Mind Games by William Deverell Read Free Book Online Page B

will sell more than the thousand hard-covers of her first effort.
When Comes the Darkness
didn’t make it into paperback.
    Over corn soup and garlic prawns we talked about Sally, whom Victoria has known for nearly three decades, having replaced, in part, the mother Sally lost in childhood. They remain pals and share secrets. Sally had come by the day before, Victoria said, but they didn’t talk much about our separation.
    “I didn’t press her, we hardly raised it. My attitude was: If she wants to vent, I’m all ears and sympathy. But we talked about Europe and about my inexpressibly revolting trial.”
    “Yes, and did she mention any male friends she might be seeing?”
    “I don’t think she’s ready for that.”
    “It might take a little time – is that what you’re saying?”
    “Honey, this is just a hiccup. She needs a break from you – she’s an artist, it’s hard to be creative when someone is pinging off the walls. You’re too wrapped up in the drama of all your incessant emotional crises. It would help if you somehow restructured your life a bit, got your act together.” Victoria is an expressive talker, her hands active, emphasizing points with chopsticks.
    “I
am
getting my act together. I’m seeing a shrink. Allison Epstein, who wants to dig into my childhood. That involves you.”
    “It’s always the mother, isn’t it? There’s a whole industry out there blaming mothers. I’ve no doubt she’s a part of it.”
    I was perplexed that she was so defensive. Was she afraid of stirring up the working-mother guilt that has always oppressed her? I was a latch-key kid, and somehow she blames herself for all the time we couldn’t spend together.
    Victoria abruptly changed the subject: she had her own crisis, her libel trial. She was set upon my coming to court, to meet with her lawyer, to help him get a handle on Mr. Huff.
    The lawyer, John Brovak, is from the bull-in-a-china-shop school of litigation. Notorious for his lack of subtlety, he’s reputed to have once mooned a judge in open court. I’d recommended against hiring him, insisting she didn’t need a lawyer – her publishers are represented by a respected Queen’s Counsel. Her response: “I want a good old-fashioned brawler in my corner. I want someone with oversized testicles to take on the evil dwarf.”
    She was needled at the Q.C. for having proposed a nuisance settlement of thirty thousand dollars – ten times the advance she got for the book. She wants vindication. It is only a coincidence that the fictitious Clint Huff has a living counterpart who also happens to be mayor of a small town. She’d picked the name at whim – it had a rural, good-old-boy flavour.
    In the novel, Mayor Huff commits ritualized, sadistic murders, and the real Huff has been on television, taking suchvigorous umbrage that one might conclude he’s revelling over his time in the spotlight. He is quite eccentric, though not without intelligence – apparently he is a capable English teacher. Adding to the weight of his claim is that he physically resembles the short, stocky, bespectacled killer in the book.
    The non-jury trial, at the New Westminster courthouse, has been assigned to Judge Betty Lafferty, who, when in practice, had a history of defending the downtrodden. It is feared that she might favour the mayor of Jackson Cove over the well-heeled defendant publisher. Clinton Huff has no Q.C. in his corner; he is, in fact, representing himself, and not well. His try for an injunction against distribution of
When Comes the Darkness
has been thrown out; the book is still in the stores.
    When I arrived by taxi, early, I found John Brovak outside the courts by the stern-faced sculpture of Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, an infamous nineteenth-century hanging judge. (He is recorded as once having told a jury
they
should be hanged for bringing in a wrong verdict.) Begbie was clutching a pipe, Brovak a cigar. He is in his late forties, tall and burly, with a