Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (15 page)

Warren gathered up his papers. "I'll do what I can," he promised. "We'll give these bastards a run for their money. But for God's sake, if you change your mind, let me know."

===OO=OOO=OO===

Judge Parker ordered Warren into her chambers after he had
spoken to Nancy Goodpaster. Goodpaster looked unhappy. She said to Warren, "I think you're making a mistake. You and Quintana both."

Once again Warren remembered his youthful vision: the law as protector, lawyers as the standard-bearers of decency and fairness. And he remembered Hector saying, "I don't know. I don't care. I am innocent."

He sat on the couch in front of the bookcase full of Harvard Classics, facing the judge's desk. The full strength of the afternoon sun burned through the windows behind him onto his neck. On the desk, behind a Tibetan statuette of a horse, was the bronze plaque that Rick had mentioned, invoking guidance from the deity and promising Her indulgence. Warren hadn't seen it before now. He wondered if the judge set it out there only for special occasions.

Lou Parker pinched her cigarette between her thumb and index finger and pointed it at him as if it were a dart she was about to throw. Right between his eyes.

"Let me get this straight, Mr. Blackburn. Less than a week ago you asked the prosecutor if she'd cut a deal with you."

"That's correct, your honor."

"Nancy agreed to forty years. That was a pretty good deal."

"But my client won't go for it, your honor."

"If a guy comes to me for sentencing on a capital, I drop fifty to sixty on him."

If you're in a good mood, Warren thought.

"My client is a stubborn man," he said. "He says he's innocent. And I happen to believe him."

Parker rasped, "Then you're a fool. My memory is that you and I sat right here one day not so long ago and got our signals straight. I'm not supposed to know the facts of a case until it comes to trial, but I ain't deaf or blind. I told you this was a whale in the barrel for the prosecution. I told you to plead this guy out and not waste my court time. You think I've forgotten? You do this to me, and I promise you'll never get an appointment in my court again."

"So let Nancy take her best shot," Warren said, ignoring the threat. "What difference does it make if my client insists on going to trial?"

Parker raised her voice: "I'll tell you what difference it makes. You're supposed to represent this man's best interests. If he pleads not guilty and doesn't stand a chance to win, and you've got an offer on the table that will save his miserable life, you've got a responsibility to try and talk him into taking that offer.
Even if you think he's innocent!
That's elementary, but I have a bad feeling in my colon that certain elementary things may escape you from time to time, like they did once before."

Warren frowned, drumming his fingers nervously on the arm of the couch. The barb had drawn blood.

The judge leaned forward, like a hound pointed toward a quarry. "Have you talked straight with this man Quintana?"

"I did my best," Warren said, wondering if that was true.

"How come I don't quite believe you? How come I think you're aiming to use up two valuable weeks of my courtroom time playing to the crowd? And picking up a fat fee for every day you're in court?"

"I don't know, your honor," Warren said, letting his annoyance show. The back of his neck felt toasted from the sun slanting through the window. "Why don't you tell me how come?"

"Don't sass me, counselor!"

"Then, Judge Parker, don't question my doing what I think is best for my client, whom you never met, and who, I remind you, claims he's innocent."

"And don't they all," said Parker, "until you give them the facts of life. We're not talking about shock probation or ninety-day jail therapy here. We're talking about a needle in the arm.
Buenas noches, José."

"He knows all that."

In the face of his firmness, her exasperation ripened. Her face grew florid. "Just how do you plan to benefit, counselor? You won't work in my court again. This case isn't going to make any headlines — this is a dumbshit ignorant wetback supposed to have blown away a Vietnamese handyman. So what's on your so-called mind? How do you justify this farce?"

There was a quality to her voice, Warren thought, that would have made a rake scraping across a concrete sidewalk sound appealing. His back muscles tensed. His fingers kept drumming and he tapped one shoe steadily on the carpet. Quintana's defense would be flimsy even in a fair trial with a dispassionate judge. Now that he had pissed Parker off to this extent, the concept of dispassionate judicial rulings seemed about as likely as the chance of snow on the day of trial.

And I might be wrong, Warren thought. Jesus, I might be wrong again. I can't afford that. That won't just kill my career, it will kill all the faith I ever had.

He felt a growing dismay but he knew he would not, could not, budge. When she realized he had no intention of answering her, Judge Parker clenched her teeth and snatched her court calendar. She leafed through it rapidly, then turned to Nancy Goodpaster.

"Madam Prosecutor, is the state ready for arraignment?"

"Yes, your honor." Those were Goodpaster's first words in chambers.

"The court will take a plea this coming Monday, June 12, at 9 A.M. Defense motions next Friday, June 16. State has a week to respond. How about a trial date? State ready?"

"The state can be ready in seven days," Goodpaster said.

"Too soon. But I have an open date on the docket for Wednesday, July 5, right after the holiday weekend. On July 21, that's a Friday, I go on vacation to Hawaii. That's the deal."

Warren jumped to his feet.

Voir dire — the questioning and selection of jurors — normally was done in groups of forty or sixty citizens at a time, depending upon the size of the courtroom. But in a capital murder trial, because the possibility of the death penalty existed, each juror was questioned individually. The process could take weeks.

"Judge Parker," he pleaded, "that's a gun to my head. Including voir dire, you're allowing less than three weeks for the whole case. And I've got only three weeks to prepare! In a capital murder case, that's nothing!"

"You're talking Chinese to a pack mule, counselor. My docket's full right through Thanksgiving. See for yourself." She tossed her open calendar book to his side of the desk. "You want a trial, voir dire begins on July 5. That's it."

Warren made himself calm down. He tried another tack. "Scoot Shepard and I are trying
Boudreau
on July 24. With all due deference, can't we do
Quintana
when you come back from your vacation?"

The judge stubbed out her cigarette and leaned back in her armchair. "Never mind that due deference bullshit. You don't defer to me at all, and you can be sure I won't to you. You're a goddam fool. I feel sorry for you."

She flicked her hand toward the door.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In Goodpaster's office — after she had settled behind her desk and dealt with an insistently ringing telephone, and after Warren had reflected for some minutes on the awful prospects ahead, for himself as well as for his client — he said, "You have a good memory, Madam Prosecutor?"

Her eyes narrowed. Sunlight filtering through the Venetian blinds accentuated her cheekbones. "I don't forget court appearances, if that's what you mean."

"I want you to remember everything that happened in there today. Make some notes if you have to."

"Why?"

"Just for the hell of it, Nancy," he said. "Just in case in the heat of battle I forget. Did you tell Mrs. Singh she shouldn't talk to me?"

"I wouldn't do a thing like that. I just told her she didn't have to if she didn't want to."

"Can I see the offense report now?"

"No."

"Didn't Parker tell you this was a whale in a barrel? What are you scared of?"

"I'm just keeping to the rules. I could have showed you the file if you were going to plead out. But you're not, so I can't. You know that. It's war now, not a game."

"I wonder what made me think it was a game," he said. "Fuck you."

Goodpaster managed a small smile. She was a prosecutor — she had heard those words often from defense attorneys. After the trial, prosecutor and defense attorney usually had a drink together and apologized for any expletives uttered in the heat of combat. And they always shook hands.

Warren rose to leave, then stopped at the door, turning again to face her. "You intend to do this for the rest of your life?"

"That might be a little tiring," Goodpaster said.

"You mean one day you'd like to be a defense attorney and make those big bucks. Be another Scoot Shepard."

Goodpaster shrugged. "I suppose so. That's the light at the end of the tunnel. Although sometimes, as you should know, the light at the end of the tunnel may be a train."

"That's good. Is that original?"

"I might have heard it somewhere, I can't remember."

"Work on your memory, Nancy," Warren said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

That evening, about an hour before Warren drove home, Scoot Shepard left his office in the Republic Bank Building and headed toward the Houstonian Club. On balance he was in a good mood — the jury had found his banker client not guilty of driving while intoxicated. As was his habit, Scoot had spent about ten minutes alone with the twelve men and women in the jury room to find out what had motivated their decision. "We didn't trust the police officer's judgment," the jury foreman explained, "after he made a mistake reciting the alphabet."

Scoot was meeting some cronies for an early session of bourbon and draw poker. Behind him, downtown office buildings were reflected in the mirrors of yet other facades. Ahead of him a veil of cirrus cloud was touched with the fire of a setting sun. He reached into the glove compartment of his Cadillac for a bottle of Maalox tablets. All day he'd been chewing, but his indigestion refused to go away. Neither would the headache at the base of his skull.

He had passed Allen Park and Buffalo Bayou and was on Memorial Drive heading west. Without warning — if you discounted the last two years of headaches and dizzy spells, and the admonitions of his wife and the nagging of his doctor — his eyesight blurred. The road went severely out of focus. Scoot felt only a jarring pain in his left temple, as if someone had jabbed him with a knuckle. He had suffered a slight stroke, caused by the occlusion of a blood vessel in the brain.

He was on a winding part of the drive flanked by colonial homes with clipped lawns, and at that moment the road changed from a right curve to a left curve. Scoot failed to see that. Just as the Cadillac hopped the curb, his instincts were good enough to force his foot onto the brake pedal, or he would have plowed up a lawn, knocked down the cast-iron statue of a black boy in hunting regalia, and smashed at forty miles an hour into the side of a two-story brick house.

The Cadillac veered, but there was still a leafy old pin oak in his path. Just as his bumper struck with a thunderclap and the grillwork wrapped itself around the trunk of the tree and the steering column began to fracture his chest, Scoot cried out desperately,
"Oh, shit! They got me…"

What "they"? What furies? What avenging demons from courtrooms past? No one would ever know. No one would even know he said the words.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Driving home on the freeway, seeking out the lanes where traffic seemed to flow less jerkily, disconsolate over what had happened in Judge Parker's office and what it foretold for his client's trial, Warren felt a new refrain pounding in his head.
I want my wife back.
I need her, I need someone to talk to. I may be going off the deep end. There was no blame in his heart now, only soreness. He speculated yet again as to why she had been in tears when he came into the house. Had her New York lawyer given an ultimatum? Was she mourning her marriage? Was she feeling sorry for we? He had ached to ask but hadn't dared. She might have answered truthfully.

I want her back. I'm a country boy. We mate for life.

Alone at home, he mixed a vodka tonic at the wet bar. Six thirty-two on the wall clock. He switched on the TV in the family room.

There was Charm, ripening in color, blue eyes leveled at him, lips moving soundlessly, slim hands clasped together on the desk in front of the skyline backdrop. He punched up the volume a few clicks.

"… when we come back, we'll have the tragic story of a Sugar Land woman who gave birth to her second set of deformed triplets, and the weather, and sports, including the latest about the Astros from our ever-optimistic Don Benson. Please stay with us, friends."

Nice touches. She always seemed to mean what she said. He had understood Johnnie Faye in the Sports Bar. But it was Charm's choice, not his. He would have to listen and
grasp and unburden. He couldn't keep all his depression of the last years locked
out of sight. In the end, all he could do was tell her he loved her and forgave
her, and wanted to try to be closer to her. He wondered if the New York lawyer
was still in town. He tried to keep vulgar images from his mind, and of course
the moment he fought against them they forced their way in. Think of anything
but an elephant� that was a game they had played as kids by the Shamrock pool.
And you saw elephants everywhere.

He untied his slim file on the
Quintana
case.

Voir dire in three weeks. Lou Parker was within her rights: the law held that you had to be ready for trial thirty days after indictment, or ten days after the court took your plea. Usually the dockets were so crowded that the judges granted continuances even more automatically than they marched through their sentencing speeches. Once a date was set you could demand a postponement only if there was a missing witness who was crucial to the case. But you had to prove it. And he had no such witness.

He studied his notes from the visit to the Trunhs. Goodpaster in final argument would make the point that if robbery hadn't been the motive, what sense did the murder make? No one claimed that the murderer and the victim knew each other. My best chance, he thought, is to knock out the special circumstances — the theft of the wallet. If I can do that, then the jury might ask themselves why Hector would want to murder a man he didn't know. Not that a jury was required to consider motive — they were judges only of the facts: did Hector Quintana willingly and knowingly kill Dan Ho Trunh? But juries were not always rational, did not always follow the judge's orders. Maybe, if they believed there was no robbery, one or two of them would be uneasy on the question of motive. It took only one or two to hang up a jury. Or maybe they would find Hector guilty and then, when they had to decide on punishment, be lenient.