Barney's Version (54 page)

Striding up and down in my apartment in the early morning hours, drinking alone, pulling on my umpteenth Montecristo of the day, I shut my eyes and summoned up Miriam as she appeared at my wedding to The Second Mrs. Panofsky. The most enchanting woman I had ever seen. Long hair black as a raven's wing. Striking blue eyes to die for. Wearing a blue chiffon cocktail dress, and moving about with the most astonishing grace. Oh that dimple in her cheek. Those bare shoulders.

— I've got two tickets for tomorrow's flight to Paris in my jacket pocket. Come with me.

— You can't be serious.

— ‘Come live with me and be my love.' Please, Miriam.

— If I don't leave now, I could miss my train. Miriam has been gone for three years now, but I still sleep on my side of the bed and grope for her when I waken. Miriam, Miriam, my heart's desire.

Okay, here goes. The trial. Me and the great Franz K., both falsely accused.

Were I a real writer, I would have shuffled the deck of my memoirs so that this would be a real nail-biter. Worthy of Eric you-know, he wrote
The Something of Dimitrios
. Eric like I was going for a walk. Eric Stroller? No. Eric like that publication Sam Johnson used to write for.
Idler
. Eric Idler?
⁷⁹
No. Never mind. Forget it. I've got a better example. More recent. Worthy of John le Carré. But you already know I was adjudged innocent by the jury, if only for lack of a corpse, but not by the gossips of this city, most of whom still believe I got away with murder.

O'Hearne grinned as Lemieux put the cuffs on me, and I was taken to the police station in St-Jérôme, where I was fingerprinted and sat still for a mug shot. If I ended up entrusted to the hangman, I resolved to feign cowardice — just like James Cagney of blessed memory — as a favour to my priest, Pat O'Brien, so that the Dead End Kids would no longer regard me as a hero (or role model, as they say now), but instead would join the local Rotary Club. I was locked into a cell not up to the Ritz standards but an improvement on the dungeon that the Count of Monte Cristo had to endure. I was also blessed with a turnkey eager to supplement his meagre salary. Well now, it's easy to joke about it today, but at the time I was terrified, given to crying jags and shivering fits. Charged with murder, I was denied bail. “It won't go any further than a preliminary hearing,” said Hughes-McNoughton. “I'm going to plead a total lack of evidence.”

Later I learned that the Crown, their case weak, was not gung-ho to prosecute, even though O'Hearne had assured them it was only a matter of time before he dug up the body. But a rampaging Second Mrs. Panofsky had hired a fire-eater of a criminal lawyer, a man with political influence, who insisted I be charged; and naturally that
yenta
waived spousal privilege. Nothing would stop that chatterbox
from enjoying her day in court. The hell with her. What worried me was Miriam, who flew in from Toronto and was allowed to visit me on my second day in the slammer. “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want you to know that I didn't murder Boogie.”

“I believe you,” she said.

“I'll be out of here in a week,” I said, hoping that saying it aloud would render it true. “Meanwhile, I'm making some useful connections. If I want my house or business burned down, I've got a guy here who will do it on reasonable terms. Something else. I'm not the only innocent man here. We've all been falsely accused. Even the guy who took out his wife with an axe because the eggs were supposed to be sunny-side up, not turned over. Actually what happened is she suffered a dizzy spell, tumbled down the steps to the cellar, and landed head first on the upturned axe. He got blood on his shirt when he tried to help her. Please don't cry. They won't keep me here long. Honestly.”

I had to wait eight days for my preliminary inquiry before a magistrate, who denied Hughes-McNoughton's plea and ruled there was “sufficient evidence to justify a trial, namely evidence on which a reasonable jury, properly instructed, might convict.” The clincher, according to Hughes-McNoughton, were my initial lies to O'Hearne about the gun, which made me suspect. “Now Barney, old pal,” he said, “I don't want any surprises in the courtroom. Is O'Hearne going to find a body?”

“Where?”

“How in the hell would I know?”

“I didn't kill him.”

Five long weeks would pass before my case was scheduled to be heard at the autumn assizes in St-Jérôme. Miriam flew in every weekend, putting up at a local motel, and brought me books, magazines, Montecristos, and smoked-meat sandwiches from Schwartz's.

“Miriam, if by some fluke I am sentenced to rot in prison, I don't expect you to wait for me. You're free.”

“Barney, would you please wipe your eyes. Nobility doesn't suit you.”

“But I mean it.”

“No, you don't, my darling.”

My good companions in the hoosegow included the idiot who held up the local grocery, making off with eighty-five dollars and change, and ten cartons of cigarettes, and was nabbed trying to unload his booty in a bar the same afternoon. There were a couple of car thieves, a guy who dealt in stolen
TV
and hi-fi sets, a small-time drug dealer, a flasher, and so on.

One glance at the trial judge and I sensed that I was for the long drop into nowhere. I saw my feet dangling and prayed that my bowels wouldn't betray me during my last moments on earth. Mr. Justice Euclid Lazure, a slender, severe-looking man with dyed black hair, fierce bushy eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a slit of a mouth, had an interesting history. Like most thoughtful
québécois de vieille souche
who had come of age in the Second World War, he had flirted with fascism as a sensitive young Outremont fop. He had cut his intellectual teeth on the then-racist daily
Le Devoir
, as well as the Abbé Lionel-Adolphe Groulx's rabidly anti-Semitic
L'Action Nationale
. He had been a member of the Ligue pour la Défense du Canada, a pride of French-Canadian patriots who pledged to fight like mad dogs were Canada attacked but declined to risk their arses in what they adjudged to be yet another British imperialist war. He had been among that merry throng that had marched down the Main in 1942, smashing plate-glass windows in Jewish shops and chanting, “Kill them! Kill them!” But he had since publicly regretted his youthful indiscretions. He told a journalist, “We had no idea of what was going on in 1942. We had not yet learned about the extermination camps.” But, as Hughes-McNoughton pointed out, there was an up side to that bastard's sitting in judgment of me. Euclid's missus had run off with a concert pianist. He enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a misogynist. In an earlier case, before sentencing a woman who had buried a kitchen knife in her husband's heart, he said: “Women have climbed higher in the scale of virtue, higher than men, and I have always believed that. But people say, and I believe it, that when they fall, women reach a level of baseness that the most vile men could not reach.”

So I could hardly wait for my garrulous, shockingly unfaithful wife to testify.

“Poor Mr. Moscovitch,” she said, “was trembling and I only got into bed with him to keep him warm, because I have empathy for anybody in distress, regardless of race, colour, creed, or sexual proclivity. I am a tolerant person. People have commented on that quality in me. But, m'lord, we do have to draw the line somewhere. No offence to anybody in this courtroom, for I have the greatest respect for French Canadians. I adored our maid. But, speaking frankly, I think your people should give up the tradition of having all of a bride's teeth extracted before her wedding. If you ask me, there are better gifts you could give a groom.

“Now only the dirty-minded could read anything sexual into my getting into bed with Mr. Moscovitch, although speaking as an attractive woman in her prime I do have my needs, and my husband hadn't enjoyed his conjugal rights in months. Why, he even failed to consummate our union on our wedding night, the date of which he wanted to have changed because it conflicted with the Stanley Cup playoffs. Never mind the deposit my father had put down at the Temple, or that the invitations had gone out and more than one Gursky was coming. We're friends of the family. Long-standing. There was no expense spared at our wedding. For my princess, my father used to say, only the best will do, which was why he bitterly opposed my marriage to Mr. Panofsky. He comes from another
monde
, my father said, and he was right, boy was he ever right, but I thought I could uplift Barney, you know, like a feminine Professor Higgins from
Pygmalion
, that play by the great Bernard Shaw. Maybe you saw the movie version with Leslie Howard, which must have earned him that part in
Gone With the Wind
. I absolutely adored the musical version,
My Fair Lady
, with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, and I'm not surprised it was such a big hit. I can remember when I left the theatre with my mother, the tunes still playing in my head, I said —”

The judge, suppressing a yawn, intervened: “You got into bed with Mr. Moscovitch …”

“To keep him warm. So help me God. I was wearing my pink satin nightgown with the lace fringe that I bought at Saks on my last trip to New York with my mother. We go shopping together the saleswomen take us for sisters. For a woman her age she has some figure …”

In 1960,
⁸⁰
women were still considered too dim for jury duty in Quebec, so my fate was in the hands of twelve men, good and true citizens. Local yokels. Pig farmers, and a hardware clerk, a bank teller, a mortician, a carpenter, a florist, a snow-plough operator, and so on, all of whom obviously resented their wasted time in court. Educated, as they were, by backwoods priests, I figured they were waiting to see if I had a tail. I even considered turning up barefoot one day, if only to prove I did not have cloven hoofs.

Opening for the Crown, Mario Begin,
QC
, said, “My learned confrère will no doubt remind you again and again that there is no body, but the truth is we do have sufficient facts at our disposal to prove that a murder was committed. And far from there being no body, I prefer to put it to you that the corpse of the murdered man has not yet been found. Look at it this way. Between the accused's first phone call to the police, which was awfully clever of him, and the second inquiry by Detective-Sergeant Sean O'Hearne, he had a long day in which to dispose of the murdered man. And, remember, we are dealing with a self-acknowledged liar. Mr. Panofsky has admitted that he lied twice to the Sûreté. I put it to you that he lied not twice but three times about that revolver. First of all, he told Detective-Sergeant O'Hearne that he had no idea how the revolver got to be lying on his very own bedside table. And then confronted with the fact that there was an empty chamber in the revolver, he lied again, saying that the revolver had been left behind by his father, who never knew how to load a gun properly. I find that amazing, considering that his father had been an experienced police officer. But the third lie is what concerns us here. Yes, the accused finally admitted he had fired the revolver, but only in jest, over the victim's head. But as you will learn from Detective-Sergeant O'Hearne, the accused did break down in the end and confess to murder. He said, quote, I shot him through the heart, unquote. These were his own words. ‘I shot him through the heart.'

“Now this is not easy for me. Like you, gentlemen of the jury, I am not without compassion. We are talking about a husband who came
home to find his wife and best friend in bed together. Surely he couldn't have been pleased. But, without making light of the accused's distress on finding his unhappy wife in bed with another man, it was no licence for murder. ‘Thou shalt not kill' is one of the commandments in the covenant that his people made with the Lord, and, as we all know, when it comes to the Chosen, a deal's a deal. I will not detain you here with a windy and fanciful opening statement, because I can rely on the evidence at hand to prove that the accused is guilty of murder. There is the revolver, and the missing bullet, and the victim, who we are told was last seen diving into the lake. Had he drowned, his body was bound to float to the surface within weeks, if not days. But maybe he's still alive, and just possibly I'm the last descendant of the Czar of Russia, whose family was most cruelly murdered on the orders of the Communist Leon Trotsky né Bronstein. Or possibly Mr. Moscovitch — without money — his passport left behind — climbed out of the lake on the opposite shore and, clad only in his bathing suit, hitchhiked back to the United States. If you can believe that, I've got a property in a Florida swamp that I'd like to sell you.

“Gentlemen of the jury, you must not let your feelings for a wronged husband impose on your good natures. Murder is murder is murder. And, once you have heard the evidence, I expect you to find the accused guilty as charged.”

Then it was John Hughes-McNoughton's turn to shine.

“I honestly don't know what I'm doing here. I'm amazed. In all my years at the bar, I've never had a case like this. Open and shut, if you ask me. I'm expected to defend my client, to the best of my humble abilities, against a charge of first-degree murder, but there is no body. What next? Will I be asked to defend an honest banker against a swindling charge, when there is no money missing? Or a respectable citizen accused of burning down his warehouse, when there has been no fire? I have such respect for the law, our distinguished judge, my learned confrères, and you, gentlemen of the jury, that I must apologize in advance for this case ever having come so far, an insult to your intelligence. But here we are,
faute de mieux
, so I must get on with it. As you have already heard, Barney Panofsky, a loving husband and provider, turned up expectedly at his cottage in the Laurentians one
morning and found his wife and his best friend in bed together. Imagine the scene, those of you who are also loving husbands. He arrives, bearing treats, and discovers himself betrayed. By his wife. By his best friend. My learned confrère will ask you to believe that Mrs. Panofsky was not committing adultery. Oh, no. She was not wanton. Consumed by illicit lust. Wearing an alluring nightgown, she snuggled into bed with Mr. Moscovitch because he was trembling, and she wished to warm him. I hope you are touched. But, to come clean, I'm not. Were there no more blankets available? Or a hot-water bottle? And how come when the accused surprised the two of them in bed, how come the wife to whom he was devoted
was no longer wearing her revealing pink satin nightgown
? Was Mrs. Panofsky, unlike the trembling Mr. Moscovitch, insensitive to cold? Or was she obliged to shed her protective nightgown in order to facilitate penetration? I leave that up to you to decide. I also trust you to decide why a married woman, entering another man's bedroom in the absence of her husband, did not stop to put on her readily available dressing-gown. I also must ask, if her embracing Mr. Moscovitch was so innocent, why did she flee the cottage in such haste? Why didn't she stay on to explain? Was it because she was consumed by shame? Justifiably, if you ask me. You will hear medical evidence of a residue of male sperm found on Mr. Moscovitch's sheets, but don't let that worry you. He probably masturbated during the night.”