Barrington Street Blues by Anne Emery Page B

ground to top it all off. Anyway, as I’m sure you know, it’s been on hold for six years while a whole tangle of legal issues wound their way through the courts. Supreme Court of Canada heard it, sent it back here. Our court just gave it the go-ahead with some modifications.”
    â€œSo we’ve got a big development that’s going ahead, after years of delay. You’re right: big bucks for somebody,” I remarked.
    â€œYep. MacDonald and company, and a few other firms, stand to make a pile. Some lawyers worked on it and never saw a cent; now they will. Money that’s been held in trust, earning interest, is about to be released. It’s been a long wait for some of them. You’re obviously not in on it, so don’t go near Wigginstaff’s tonight. I hear there’s a big party planned. Poor old Albert Farris never lived to see it; guess his partners will reap the benefits.”
    â€œI never knew Albert.”
    â€œYou must have known Dice Campbell. His ghost will be hovering over the gathering tonight. Old Dice loved a party!”
    â€œDice was involved?”
    â€œOh, yeah. Big winnings for him if he’d stuck around. Poor bastard.”
    â€œIs that right. Who took over Dice’s files when he died, do you know?”
    â€œJamie McVicar.”
    â€ 
    Jamie McVicar and I had gone to law school together. When I returned to the office I gave him a call and asked him whether I couldgo through Dice Campbell’s files. I told McVicar about the Luger P-08, which suggested a connection between the Campbell suicide and the putative murder-suicide of Leaman and Scott. I didn’t mention what I had just heard about Campbell and the Bromley Point development. McVicar told me to come right over.
    As I was leaving, though, I saw someone wheeling our television and VCR into the boardroom, and that reminded me I had not yet retrieved the Netherlands Liberation video I had lent to Bill Groves. So I took a detour over to Camp Hill to pick it up. I didn’t recognize the man in Bill’s room. When I tracked down a nurse, she told me Bill had died early in the week.
    â€œI’m sorry. You didn’t know? Are you a relative?”
    â€œNo. I just met Bill a few days ago.” But I felt the loss all the same. The nurse found the video for me, and I decided the least I could do in memory of Bill was watch the film about Canadian soldiers in Holland. I put it on my dashboard to take home that night, and continued on to McVicar’s law office.
    Jamie led me to a boardroom, where he had stacked the dusty boxes containing Dice’s files. A cup of coffee, a pen and a notepad were in place on the table. I thanked him, and got to work. With even a cursory review of the files, in chronological order, you could plot the rise and fall of Dice Campbell on a graph. He started with the usual storefront practice: low-end property transactions, wills, divorces, a bit of commercial work. And he was obviously well-regarded in the profession. Rowan Stratton had sent some work his way. Even the lordly John Trevelyan had selected Campbell for a little job, namely to amend a lease, write to the Canada Pension office, and prepare a will, all for a woman named Matilda Lonergan. If Mrs. Lonergan had been in a nursing home, Trevelyan’s hourly rate for the trip out to see her would have been three times the fee he could decently charge her for the work. No wonder he handed it off to a younger, cheaper lawyer. I flipped to the last page of the will, which was a list enumerating every teacup, china poodle, and knickknack the old lady owned. The lease was for a duplex she owned in a rundown area of central Halifax. But it was not long before things began looking up for Dice. I saw that one of the largest insurance companies in the city had directed a healthy portion of its defence work his way. He began to get more andmore criminal work as the years went by. I found the