by Reason of Sanity (4 page)

At the old legal limit of 0.10, a guy who’s not too bulky might be a little wobbly on his feet and probably fail the FST: that’s the touch-your-nose, stand balanced one leg, and walk-a-straight-line Field Sobriety Test that cops make you take when you get stopped for being a suspected drunk driver.

Levels between 0.15 and 0.20 will usually make one’s speech slur and the driver will obviously appear under the influence, even to an inexperienced observer.

Once you hit 0.20, the official designation is “shit-faced’ and with that much booze in your system, an average person will most probably have slurred speech and difficulty pronouncing any word with more than two syllables.

Anything over 0.25 will usually result in wet pants and a terrible body odor. Readings over 0.30 can cause special conditions like unconsciousness or death.

In Vinnie’s case, the guy ‘blew’ a 0.19 at th e station. This may have been as much as an hour after the accident, so he probably was at the 0.20 level or higher at the time he interrupted Vinnie’s pit stop, and that is definitely drunk, no matter how much body mass or alcohol tolerance you’ve got.

I call county jail to see if there’s any chance of getting to interview him, but they tell me he never got there because Fradkin Bail Bonds took him out of the West Los Angeles Division jail and his sponsor picked him up. I call the bail bond place but they won’t reveal the name of the sponsor, the person putting up the bail.

The County of Los Angeles owns all of the waterfront property in Marina del Rey and they lease out large parcels for people to build apartment buildings and boat slips. This evening there’s a fireworks celebration in the Marina, being put on by the new buyer of a large leased anchorage and apartment parcel. He obviously can afford it because his family makes about a million every day, selling oil to the U.S.

At about nine PM, some surprising events take place. First, the fireworks start. They’re on the other side of the Marina, so I can’t see them from our boat, but the sounds are quite loud. Suddenly I’m being pinned to the couch by a heavy weight against my chest. At first I think I might be suffering a heart attack, but when I look down I see that the fireworks have obviously frightened the Saint Bernard, so he decided to jump up into the safety of my lap, where he promptly buries his head under my arm and whines for the next ten minutes until the noises stop.

After it’s ov er, he looks up at me with a sorrowful face. I return his look with one that says “I’ve got your number now, pal. You’re a big baby.”

Embarrassed, he retreats to the little princess’ forward stateroom, where he could have never gotten away with that stunt because he’s not allowed up on the bunk. It’s a good thing he tried it with me, because if he jumped up on Suzi like that we’d probably need a spatula to scrape her off of the bed.

I turn on the evening news and am surprised to hear that they made an arrest in the Mike Drago case. Evidently, the security cameras paid off, because Drago had been moved into a special intensive care unit where everything in the room is videotaped. To make matters even more interesting, the newsreader goes on:

“We have learned that the district attorney has decided to bring in a special prosecutor on this case… Ms. Myra Scot, a former employee of the district attorney’s office.”

The phone rings. Caller ID is a great invention because it gives me a few seconds to compose myself whenever Myra calls me. “Hello my dear, I see you made the evening news again. Good luck with this one. With the whole act on tape, you should have no problems getting a plea.”

“Peter, I want you to watch me destroy the defense attorney on this one.”
“No thanks sweetheart, I’m not that interested in watching a massacre.”
“That’s not fair. Up until now all you’ve seen me do is annihilate the former district attorney, who was incompetent. This is a capital case, so it’ll probably be a really good lawyer on the other side who will be getting destroyed by my magnificent prosecution.”
“So, what’s that got to do with me?”
“You’ll find out, Petey.” I wish she wouldn’t call me that.
As soon as I hang up with Myra, it rings again. I don’t recognize the number on caller I.D., but pick up the phone anyway. It’s a woman’s voice. “Hello, Mister Sharp?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Mary, Judge Axelrod’s clerk. We just want you to know that on the recommendation of Myra Scot, the special prosecutor, you’ve been appointed as defense counsel on a capital murder case. We’ll have the file delivered to your office. The arraignment has been scheduled for next Tuesday.”

osing is not fun, and I ought to know, because I’ve got plenty of experience in that area. When you practice criminal law, about ninety-nine percent of the people you represent actually did what they were charged with doing. The only reason I had a one percent acquittal rate had nothing to do with the defendants’ innocence. It was only because of missing witnesses, evidence that confused the jury,

This case will not be going into the one percent success group because like all the others, it’s a loser. I’ll have to do my best, but this time there’ll be no walking into court waving a document that clears the client and humiliates the prosecution. I’m afraid those days are over for everyone but Ben Matlock and Perry Mason.

About the only thing I can do on this one is try to break down the timeline of the video. I send a request over to Myra’s office for copies of the tapes they’ve no doubt made for me. The only time that the prosecutors are happy to provide you with their evidence is when it nails your client to the wall beyond any reasonable doubt. I guess it’s time to go downtown, pick up my appointment file and visit the new client.

After checking in the front desk of Twin Towers, Los Angeles’ modern county jail, and presenting my State Bar card, a Deputy Sheriff leads me back to the attorney interview area, where I sit and wait about twenty minutes for my client to be brought in.

No client appears. Instead, a jailer comes in and tells me that my client would rather not see me.
This is a new one. After over twenty years of doing this, I’ve never been refused an interview before. And to make it even weirder, I wasn’t forcing myself on this guy, because the court clerk said that he approved of my representing him when the court appointed me.
Just to make sure I’m not missing out on something, on the way out of the building I stop by the Captain’s office to find out exactly what their policy is for inmates who don’t want to see their lawyer. My client was right and I was wrong. The Captain tells me that an inmate does have a right to refuse a visit – even by his own attorney. Not only did he not want to see me – he also gave me an important indication of how difficult this case will be to handle…it’s going to be uphill all the way. If he’s smart enough to avoid meeting with me, I hope he’s also smart enough to figure out some strategy to beat this case – because I sure can’t.

Approaching the Marina, I see some-thing that’s now familiar to me but almost caused me to wreck my car the first time I saw it – a huge Saint Bernard driving an electric cart. Actually, as I now know very well, the dog doesn’t drive – it’s Suzi. The dog sits up on the front seat next to her but if you see them from a certain angle, she’s hidden behind the dog.

Her usual routine during the week includes stopping by the private mailbox place to pick up the firm’s incoming stuff, making a deposit at the driveup ATM window and stopping by the Chinese restaurant around the corner, where she and the dog disappear inside for an hour or so.

Because her late mother was a head waitress at the place, she’s treated like royalty there. And since all the local cops eat lunch there every day, she’s become their official mascot, so she can do no wrong in their jurisdictions.

On today’s trip, when she sees me, I’m honored with a wave of her hand as she speeds down the alley towards the rear entrance to the Chinese restaurant.

Suzi’s late stepfather Melvin explained to me that she’s got the authorities convinced she’s being home-schooled, so as long as she keeps passing their quarterly tests, she has her days free to run the law practice I work for and volunteer at the hospital with that huge animal of hers.

I still get a kick out of how she taught the dog to stand up on his hind legs, open the mailbox door with a paw and then deposit the mail from his mouth into the slot. During the rainy season, she has the dog trained to do the mail run all by himself. Of course none of this is amazing compared to how she’s got me trained during the past six months. Each morning I make my bed, throw away yesterday’s newspapers, wash my breakfast bowl (she can’t reach the sink), and take out the garbage.

If it’s early enough in the morning, I usually bump into Laverne, who lives on a small houseboat a few slips down on the dock. If I’ve had enough to drink in the evening, I’ve been known to allow myself to be abducted by Laverne, while walking past her houseboat. This happens at least once a month, but I never complain… it must be some form of the Stockholm syndrome, named after an event that occurred in 1973 when four Swedes were held captive for six days in a bank vault during a robbery. According to psychologists, the abused bonded to their abusers as a means to endure violence.

In my case, it’s a situation of bonding to my abductor because even though she’s got plenty of miles on her, she’s still a smooth ride.

There’s a knock on the hull. It’s a messenger with two packages for me. The court file on my lawyer-shy murderer and a stack of videocassettes – copies of the surveillance tapes from the hospital. What a pain in the ass. I’ll never have time to watch them all. Each one is eight hours long, recorded in stop-motion intervals of one second. Fortunately they’re all labeled with a digital stopwatch appearing on the bottom of the screen that constantly displays the date, hour, minute and second of the taping. I’ve been told they call it time-code.

This is all the fault of a guy named Harry Lillis Crosby, who was a great old-time crooner nicknamed ‘Bing.’ You should remember him from a bunch of old ‘road’ movies he made with a comedian named Bob Hope. There’s also an old song called
White Christmas
he recorded that sold quite well. Bing was a golf nut, but his game was interrupted quite often because he had to do his weekly television show twice during each broadcast day. The second show for local stations; the first one was show earlier, and broadcast from California to the East Coast, to allow for the time difference. Everything was shot ‘live’ in those days.

Bing came across a guy named Jack Mullin, who had an idea for a new invention called ‘videotape.’ With the help of Bing’s fifty thousand dollar investment, a process was started in the 1950’s that resulted in me now having an entire week’s worth of crime-scene videotapes to watch. Good work, Bing.

I leave the videotapes on the boat’s din ette table and start to read the file on Vinnie’s drunk driver case. Maybe I’ll have more luck with a broken tree than I had with my reluctant murderer.

I can read a book in one sitting if it’s something that I’m really interested in. I usually can usually get through about fifty pages an hour if it’s a ‘page-turner,’ so the average four-hundred-page paperback takes me a full day. There’s no break necessary for eating because I’ve mastered the art of doing both of those enjoyable tasks at the same time.