Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (17 page)

"You see," she said, "you're a good talker when you get wound up. That's what I wanted to hear. You'll walk me out of there. I like you, counselor. Go for it — you and Mr. Levine. He's a Jew, right?"

Warren nodded, wondering what would come next.

"Can't lose with a Jew and a good ole boy on my side, can I?"

Warren smiled softly.

While he was working out the details of the fee, one of the dancers, a blonde in her early twenties, worked her own way through the tables. She began to gyrate her hips in Warren's direction. She was high-bosomed, with swollen rouged nipples that seemed like miniature breasts placed in the center of the principal ones. What the world has always got plenty of, Warren thought, is flesh. Moving within six inches of him, she twisted her torso to the bass beat of the music. He looked at her coolly.

"Scat," Johnnie Faye ordered. The blonde danced away.

"You're hurting, good buddy," Johnnie Faye said. "I know the cure. Want to come party with me?"

"Not tonight. I'm spending this weekend with a law book."

"You're so square," she said. "I like that."

===OO=OOO=OO===

At Scoot's funeral on Saturday, with several hundred lawyers, judges, and former clients in attendance, Warren stood off to one side in the heat, sweating, barely listening to the eulogy. He heard other voices. He carried on conversations in his head. He was in command; his eyes and tone conveyed knowledge. "This makes sense. This is a marriage.
That's
an infatuation… at best." Tenderly enfolding his wife, he whispered in her ear, "It's going to be all right. Have faith in me." He played a younger Cary Grant, and Charm became pliant in his arms. She would stay, give up the New York lawyer. She saw the light and it wasn't a train. In his fantasies he was astute and wise. The worst he imagined was that one moment she murmured, "I need time." He said, "Take all you need, my darling."

Johnnie Faye was there at the funeral, wearing black silk, carrying a black parasol to ward off the afternoon sun. "How are you?" she asked.

"Fine. Rick and I are meeting tomorrow."

"I have faith," she said.

When he reached home that evening, Charm's car was parked in the driveway. He had hardly seen his wife since Monday, the day he had found her outside the house with her lover. Since that day, everything in Warren's life had changed. He walked through to the bedroom with Oobie clawing at his pants leg. Charm was in the shower, washing her hair. She came out with a thick brown towel wrapped around her head, another one draped around her body like a sarong.

She didn't seem surprised to see him. Or was she just indifferent? He was not wise enough to know. This was reality, not fantasy. Like the years that could pile up for Hector Quintana.

"You going to the ball game tonight?" she asked, as she began to dress. Opening the big closet door, she stepped behind it. To deny him the sight of her body. Just as well — he might have pictured it elsewhere.

"That was with a client in a murder case."

"Aren't you out of it now that Scoot's gone?"

"I'm trying the case. Rick is sitting second chair."

Charm came out from behind the closet door, wearing panties and a black silk blouse that she was buttoning over her bra. Her pale eyebrows were raised. "How'd you manage that?"

He told her about his meetings.

"And Rick's willing? No glory in that for him."

"There's enough to go around if we win. And we're both being paid."

"That's good for you, Warren. That's very positive. Is it a good case? Will you win?"

"You never know, do you?" Ordinarily he would have offered her details. "Charm, can we talk?"

"I think that's a good idea."

But the talk didn't resemble his daydreams in the car. Perhaps he had rehearsed too much. Yes, of course she wanted time… not for him to win her back, but to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. She had hired an agent in Chicago, a man named Bluestein. He was going to try and get her an anchor job in a top market: Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.

"But our life's here."

"Your life is here, Warren. Not mine. You know I always wanted something better."

"And what about us?"

The pain of the other night bloomed again in Charm's eyes. He wanted to hold her. She raised a hand to keep him back. He saw her fingers trembling.

"Warren, this is hard for me to say. I want a divorce."

It was like his worst nightmare. He took a rapid turn around the room to get control of himself. But he wasn't in control. Why the hell should he be in control? Growl like a lion. He wasn't a lion. He was a man.

"So you can marry this other lawyer and move to New York?"

"I'll decide that when I'm ready to decide it. I don't want to be rushed."

"Good," he said bitterly.

No, it wasn't good. It was awful.
Good:
the sole word he could manage to describe the destruction in his heart.

"I thought of moving out," Charm said. "But I'm selfish, I don't really want to do that. You know how I hate apartments. I thought we could share the house for a while. I just don't think we should share the bed. It's a little painful for us both."

Feel pain. Feel it the way I feel it.

"So who vacates?" He waved a hand at the room.

"That's up to you, Warren. I don't have the right to kick you out. But the guest room closets are so small. I have so much more stuff than you do. Would you mind awfully?"

After a minute he said, "I would mind a lot."

Sighing, she unwound the towel from her hair, shaking loose the wet blond strands. He followed her toward the bathroom, where she plugged in the dryer.

"Charm, are you going out?"

"Yes." The word was spoken calmly but carried weight enough to hit him in the chest like a large stone. "What about you?" Her finger poised at the switch on the hair dryer.

"I have work to do."

"Maybe we'll become friends, Warren."

"I very much doubt it." He walked out of the room before tears misted his eyes.

In the kitchen he patted Oobie, who hadn't been fed. In the recesses of the house he heard the dryer whir. It reminded him that he had to do his laundry; he was running out of underwear. He poured out the chow and mixed it in the bowl with some chunks of Alpo and then let hot water drip in to make gravy.

He watched Oobie eat. Yes, I mind a lot.

He sat down in the living room and put his head in his hands. He couldn't stay in the same house with her.

Charm left ten minutes later, calling a muffled goodbye. He heard her high heels hurrying on the walkway.

He went out for dinner at a nearby fast-food chicken house, then came back and worked on the
Quintana
file for an hour. After that he turned his attention to the
Boudreau
file, but his eyes began to tire. The two cases blurred, became one. I'm not seeing things clearly, he realized. Can't concentrate. The lives of two people are in my hands, and my fucking hands are shaking.

He watched the last part of
Casablanca
on the late movie; he knew the airport scene almost word for word. Switching off the TV, he turned down the covers on one of the twin beds in the guest room and read the new Garcia Márquez novel for half an hour, then switched off the bedside lamp at 2 A.M.

He woke at daybreak on Sunday morning. The short sleep had not refreshed him. On his way to the kitchen he noticed that the door to the master bedroom was ajar. He knocked softly, then went in: maybe they could talk. The bed had not been slept in. Charm had not come home.

"Fuck her," he said softly. And thought, I'll get on with my life. Using the kitchen telephone, he called Ravendale and made arrangements to rent an apartment. By ten o'clock he had moved himself in, with his dog for company.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Late on Monday afternoon in Judge Bingham's court, Warren M. Blackburn and Richard C. Levine were registered by the deputy district clerk as co-attorneys of record in
Texas v. Johnnie Faye Boudreau.

Warren had Xeroxed a copy of Scoot's file. "I'll read it by the weekend," Rick promised.

Rocky came up from nowhere, Warren remembered, to whip Apollo Creed. If a tongue-tied palooka from Philadelphia can do it, so can I.

Toward the end of June, on a rainy afternoon with
chocolate-brown skies crowding in from the Gulf, Judge Lou Parker called Warren and Nancy Goodpaster into her chambers. She directed her flinty gaze at the man who stood between Hector Quintana and death.

"How about clothes for your dude? I don't want this beaner sitting there with scuffs on his feet and a Harris County jumpsuit and making us all look bad. Does he have anything? If not, buy it for him. The county will reimburse. I don't mean for you to get him a five-hundred-dollar suit from Hart Schaffner & Marx. Find out his size and hike your ass down the block to Kuppenheimer. They've got a sale on." Without waiting for a thank-you she turned on Goodpaster, wagging her stubby forefinger at the prosecutor the way a father does at an errant child. "I don't believe in trial by ambush. I've told you this before, Nancy — if you've got anything smells a whiff of
Brady,
cough it up. If you can't give the defense all the information you've got and still get death, then it's not a capital case."

Get death. It was an abstraction, not a fact of a human life ending and a family drained by grief. The law stated that death was a proper penalty —
lex talionis,
slaying by legal sanction. Penalty: as in, you made a mistake and this is what you must pay. Fifteen yards for unnecessary roughness; throw dirt at the umpire and you get kicked out of the game. Knowing the criminal population as intimately as he did, Warren believed there should be stiffer sentences for violent crimes committed for profit: any man who carried a loaded weapon during the commission of a felony was prepared to use it. Give him a fair trial, then separate him from peaceful society for as long as the law allowed. The death penalty, however, was no deterrent and a dangerous balm. Primitive man hanging tough.

Nancy Goodpaster repeated to Judge Parker that she had nothing to reveal.

"Jury selection starts a week from Wednesday," the judge advised, "and I can goddam well guarantee that I'm not going to spend more than eight days picking a jury. I limit voir dire to thirty minutes a side for each juror. I keep a chess clock on my desk. When it goes
ping,
you've had it. No exceptions. Get yourselves organized."

She stared at Warren somberly. "You better think hard about all this. You want to cut a deal and plead your guy out at the eleventh hour, I won't be overjoyed you waited so long. But I sure as hell won't stop you. That clear?"

"Clear," Warren said.

Her scowl deepened. "I'll see you both for voir dire, a week from Wednesday at nine sharp."

Proper voir dires in Texas capitals had been known to last more than a month. Not in Lou Parker's court. The chess clock ticked.

"Which is fucking unconstitutional," Rick Levine said, when Warren told him. "Not to mention disgusting. You could challenge her on it, you know. File a motion citing higher court rulings against any limitations. If she overrules, it's built-in error for a reversal."

"I'd just as soon save the point," Warren said. "It may be the only thing I'll have on appeal."

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the evenings, in his apartment at Ravendale, he watched
movies on a rented VCR. He rented a package of pots and pans and other kitchen
paraphernalia, a clock-radio, some prints of racing sailboats and snow-covered
mountains, and he stocked his refrigerator with cold cuts and frozen Stouffer's
dinners, pepperoni pizzas, a quart of Polish vodka in the freezing compartment.
No more cooking � that had been in another life. He finished the Garcia Marquez book and began one on the Reagan presidency. Sometimes, at high volume, he played Bach and Verdi and Gordon Lightfoot on his ghetto blaster, until the neighbors complained. He never made the bed and he washed the dishes every third day. The furniture in the apartment was ordinary beige motel-style, but he could leave a mug of hot coffee on the coffee table without anyone telling him to put a coaster under it. The rings on the table grew and overlapped.

He and Rick met several times with Johnnie Faye to hear her story and prepare a trial notebook. Warren gave her a definition: "Self-defense is where you use deadly force to thwart the immediate anticipation that you're about to be killed or suffer serious bodily injury, and you have no opportunity to retreat. It's what we call an affirmative defense. The jury is charged to view all of the circumstances from your point of view." Johnnie Faye's testimony was the key: if the jury believed her she would be acquitted, if they doubted her she would be found guilty. "This goes in three stages," Warren explained. "First you tell us exactly what happened. Then we interview other possible witnesses. Then we woodshed you — prepare you for direct examination and cross-examination under oath. For now, don't leave anything out, no matter how trivial you think it is. Don't put anything in that isn't a fact. Tell us the minute-by-minute truth. We're your lawyers. We're here to help you, not to judge you."

But her tale of the events never varied. The lawyers took notes. Rick then brought the notes back to his office for his secretary, Bernadette Loo, to transcribe into computer memory. Small-boned, round-faced, heavy-lidded, pure Chinese in appearance, Bernadette Loo was third-generation Texan in speech and attitude. She favored cheongsams and jade jewelry, was divorced from a Houston fireman and dated a seemingly endless string of men. She said things like, "He ain't much to see, but he looks real good through the bottom of a glass."

"Good case," Rick said, the first time Johnnie Faye was gone from the office. "Checks out all the way so far. If she's telling the truth, your dog could defend her and win this case. So why did you need me?"

"You bark prettier," Warren said.

The district attorney's office in the person of Bob Altschuler had given them a copy of parts of the HPD offense report. The print division had picked up enough ridges and valleys on the fireplace poker to match the fingers of both Clyde Ott's right and left hand. The poker had been found lying on the living room carpet, directly in front of the sofa that had become Clyde's penultimate resting place. Johnnie Faye's prints were on it too, but that matched her story. Altschuler had also provided Warren with a set of photographs of the living room, a floor plan of the mansion on River Oaks Drive, a transcript of what Johnnie Faye had said over the telephone to the 911 dispatcher, and a copy of Sgt. Ruiz's notes after he had reached the Ott place and heard the confession.
Brady
material, all of it, or the pages would have remained locked in the file at 201 Fannin.