Free Hangman by Michael Slade Page A

Christ!
    Not only was I still saddled with student loans; not only did I still live in the East End in a rented house; not only was my office once a hippie head shop that still stank of patchouli oil; not only did I—after seven years of university, a year of articles to an ambulance chaser, and several years of practice here on skid row—still make God knows how much less than a plumber … but now some drunk who was staggering by had turned into our entrance alcove to piss on the door to Kline & Shaw.
    I saw red.
    I threw down the newspaper piece on the Hangman.
    I stormed from the desk, tromped to the door, and yanked it open.
    The drunk pissed on my shoe as I clutched him by his grubby coat.
    I bunched my fist, cocked my arm, and was into a punch to launch his head into outer space, a reaction of the sort Mike Hammer would respect, when I spied a cop across Main Street, in front of the police station, eyeballing me.
    I’m a defense lawyer.
    Cops hate my guts.
    So at the last moment, I pulled the punch to save myself from murder one.
    The cop cocked his finger at me like a gun.
    I tipped an imaginary hat on my head.
    The drunk staggered away with his penis dangling out.
    Another depressing day at Kline & Shaw.
    The only sure cure I know is a walk uptown. So in I went to my office left of Suzy’s desk, and there I packed my secondhand briefcase with a file requiring a factum for the court of appeal. No, not a murder—a measly B and E. I popped in to tell Ethan where I’d be, and then, since I’m also janitor for Kline & Shaw, mopped up the pool of piss at the door before escaping north toward the harbor inlet.
    A black hooker wearing an orange scoop-necked blouse and tight orange crotch-cleaving shorts stood at the corner of Powell and Main, in front of a strip bar called Number 5 Orange.
    “Trick or treat?” she said.
    “A day late,” I replied.
    “Honey, it’s never bad luck to have black pussy cross yo’ path.”
    “Later,” I lied.
    “I be here,” she cooed.
    I turned west on Powell to enter Gastown, where Gassy Jack once served booze at Maple Tree Square; a statue of him on a whiskey barrel commands the five roads converging there today. Water Street ran along the inlet with the mountains beyond to the financial district, marking uptown. I angled along Granville, pausing at the Birks clock (beneath which lovers have rendezvoused since 1907) to retie my shoe, then turned west on Georgia and strolled a block over to the old courthouse, now the art gallery.
    To me, the old courthouse epitomizes law.
    That’s where I witnessed Kinky. The Hanging Judge.
    Our history of murder and hanging.
    Including the architect.
    The Rattenbury case is one of the crimes of the century. Look it up in any blood history. Rattenbury was a turn-of-the-century British architect who made his name in British Columbia. The courthouse and the legislature are his legacy. Polite society threw him out in 1924 for having an affair with Alma Pakenham, thirty years his junior. The outcasts fled to England to marry in 1928, and set up house in Bournemouth. Within six years Alma was bored, so she placed an ad in papers for a houseboy, the upshot of which was that a dim-witted youth named George Stoner ended up doing service in her bed. George got jealous of Rats, what Alma called her husband, so he bashed the old boy on the head with a mallet and did him in.
    The next day, Alma confessed to save George. Then George confessed to save Alma. Their trial at the Old Bailey was a cause célèbre. Husband 67. Wife 38. Stud 18. Alma was acquitted. George was sentenced to hang. So Alma stabbed herself to death beside a Bournemouth stream where the lovers used to go. Ironically, George didn’t hang. The sentence of death imposed on him was commuted to life without Alma.
    That’s the kind of case I dreamed would come my way.
    A cause célèbre.
    With lots of press.
    Enough to catapult me away from depressing skid row.
    Standing in front of