Legal Thriller: Michael Gresham: A Courtroom Drama (Michael Gresham Legal Thriller Series Book 1)

S
everal months ago
, I took a last look around my office before I walked out for the last time. I felt like a married person losing a spouse. This place was my home for thirty years, for better or worse, in sickness and health, in good times and in bad. It was the previous six months that had qualified for the bad: six months and a mere eight new clients. My partners voted me out of the law firm that I had founded when I was fresh out of law school. “Don’t take it personally,” managing partner Everett Evans told me, “it’s only business.” Yes, but until that moment it was
my
business and now you say it’s not? Just shove me out the door? “Article Eight—” he began, but I shut him off. I knew all about Article Eight of our Partnership Agreement: the right to vote out a non-producing partner, emphasis on
non
.

I had no explanation. New work had just vanished, and I was kicking myself every morning while I shaved and had to look into the eyes of the man who chose law over medicine and dentistry. If your customers have insurance, you’re golden. If they don’t have insurance—you’re a lawyer. A doctor wouldn’t dream of taking on a patient who has no insurance. Lawyers—lawyers do it every time a new case walks in.

Suzanne Strunk—my secretary—appeared with yet another cardboard box to hold the final artifacts that could prove I had once been a member of the firm. My framed certificate proving my good standing in
Illinois Attorneys for Criminal Justice
, my certificate for finishing Trial Lawyers College in Reno, my certificate of membership in Rotary. All three listed the name of my law firm. Plus the small stuff from the middle drawer in my Italian desk, including a stack of unused business cards with my law firm’s name in raised letters. It all went into my box and then I stood upright and clapped my hands together, scattering the imaginary dust my life had collected.

Suzanne closed the two steps between us and fiddled with my necktie. An old habit of hers, one that I allowed very rarely, for Suzanne was happily married, and married women shouldn’t be touching other men intimately like the necktie thing. I mean to me, it’s intimate. To someone else it’s housekeeping. The tears in her eyes overflowed and she touched my face with her hand. “I’m going to miss you, Michael.”

That was six months ago.

To everyone’s amazement, it turned around almost overnight and I have prospered.

I have prospered because I stumbled onto the case of the
United States of America v. James Joseph Lamb.
Suddenly, my name was in all the newspapers, I was seen on TV, and my phone started ringing off the hook.

Saved by the murder of a judge’s wife.

It’s a terrible thing to prosper off something like that. But nobody ever said the world was going to be Disneyland.

Because it isn’t.

Not where I work.

I’m a criminal lawyer.

F
BI Special Agent Nathan Fordyce
takes the witness stand, smiles at the judge and then frowns at me. I step up to the lectern. Fordyce’s eyes never move off of me. I am the lawyer who can speak black into white and night into day—Michael Gresham, consummate wordsmith. The other side of the equation is that Fordyce is the shooter you would want on your side in a firefight. His role is to send my client off to die with a needle in his skinny black arm. My role is to convince the jury that my client’s confession was coerced and that my client’s low IQ made it impossible for him to orchestrate the murder in the manner they claim. My heart goes out to this young client and his predicament. I can and will prove his diminished capacity during the course of the next several days while the jury listens and prepares to vote.

"Mr. Gresham," the judge says with a note of impatience, "please proceed with your examination." It is the second time he has addressed me.

This is a pre-trial motion to suppress. The jury is not in the courtroom, and that means the gloves come off. There is no requirement that I treat this witness compassionately, as with a jury watching. Trial begins in fifteen minutes; Judge Amberlos is drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair.

A deep breath, for I am anxious and terribly frightened for the young man whose life is in my hands. I gather up my courage and I begin.

“Agent Fordyce, I want to start by discussing how you obtained James Lamb’s confession. First, you have claimed it was freely and voluntarily given. However, your partner, Jim Burns, assaulted Mr. Lamb to make him confess. Isn’t that true?”

"No such thing."

"Mr. Lamb has promised me he was assaulted. Not true?"

"Your client has a very vivid imagination, counselor."

“It’s imagination, is it? Imagine this with me, Mr. Fordyce. Imagine my client came away with four new gold teeth after you took him into custody. Imagine very cheap gold teeth, incidentally. Cemented in his mouth by government dentists because your partner knocked the white ones out of his head with a police sap. Does that ring a bell with you?"

"No bells, counselor. Again, your client is very creative."

I turn and look down at my client. "Mr. Lamb, please smile for Mr. Fordyce."

Lamb slowly looks up at me. "Huh?"

"Stand up and smile for the FBI. Then turn around and show Court TV what your new, FBI-approved, government smile looks like."

"Objection," cries the Assistant U.S. Attorney.

"What's the basis for your objection?" asks Judge Amberlos.

"Prejudice."

"Overruled. Mr. Lamb, please show us all your smile."

Lamb stands and does a slow 360, his lips curled away from his teeth.

"Is that what they call a grill, Mr. Fordyce? I am referring to my client's funky teeth."

The FBI agent looks puzzled. "A grill? Are you talking about the gold dentures the rappers wear?"

"I am. Isn't that the look my client has now?”

“If you say so, counselor.”

"Thanks to you and your partner?”

"Thanks to your client resisting arrest, counselor."

"Please sit down, Mr. Lamb," says Judge Amberlos to my client.

Out of habit, I glance around the courtroom. I am wondering what the TV audience thought of that little display. The courtroom is noisy as the Court TV people pan their camera and whisper along the back wall. Behind me, a tripod crashes to the floor. We all turn to look. Judge Amberlos says nothing. We were shocked when he allowed the network’s motion to bring a camera into the courtroom. That never happens in federal court. But neither does a trial over the killing of a judge's wife.

Then I see that he's still there on the front row, sitting on the U.S. Attorney's side of the courtroom. His name is Francis S. Pennington Jr., and he is a District Court judge. It is his wife that my client is accused of murdering. Pennington has appeared at every court date, beginning with the initial appearance and throughout the standard motions defense lawyers file. He sits still as a statue, a lump of immutable truth: his mate is gone. It’s an odd thing, in a way; word around the courthouse has it that she was unfaithful. Of course, there’s always gossip like this. I don’t know what to make of it. But as I look him over, I can only wonder. He never moves his eyes from the young black man named James Lamb with the up yours grill in his mouth. Who could?

James Joseph Lamb is a wiry man with a perpetual squint from a lifetime of looking for cover just before a South Chicago drive-by. As if the new gold teeth aren’t enough to deal with in front of a jury, there's also the prison tat: the mandatory two blue teardrops beneath the left eye. Not an attractive package even for our racially mixed jury, which in all likelihood will see nothing in my client that is worth saving from the needle. But there’s a hitch. The ability to plan and execute this murder far exceeds Lamb's mental abilities. His IQ is pegged one point above what the psychologists categorize as having an intellectual disability. “Why are they saying I killed someone?" he asks me. "It's complicated," I tell him, which, I am sad to report, satisfies him.

Judge Amberlos says, "Mr. Gresham, was there more?“

“Yes, thank you, Your Honor."

It is time to confront the illegal search and seizure.

"Mr. Fordyce, when you arrived at my client's apartment, did you knock on the door?"

The agent hesitates. We both know it's a trap.

"I knocked on the door."

"Who answered the knock?"

"Your client. Mr. Lamb."

"James Joseph Lamb answered your knock?"

"Yes."

"Did you say anything to him?"

"I asked if we could come inside. My partner and I."

"What did he say?"

"He said no."

"What happened next?"

The special agent shifts his weight in the witness chair. He looks at the Assistant U.S. Attorney, Bob LaGuardia, who is sitting back, his face raised to the ceiling, his eyes closed. Bob is not your typical prosecutor: he is courteous, thoughtful, and slow to anger. In fact, he is affectionately known around the U.S. Attorney’s office as Bob "No-Guns" LaGuardia, for the fact he doesn't subscribe to courtroom shooting matches. No-Guns is a plodder who is fair, and juries love the guy. He woos with sugar and it works: he is 55-0. He leaves Fordyce hanging.

Special Agent Fordyce continues. "What happened next was his girlfriend pushed past him and said we could come in. It was raining, and we were standing on the porch getting soaked. I guess she felt sorry for us."

"You guess she did? But she didn't tell you that?"

"No, she just said to come inside."

"So at this point, the defendant had said you couldn't come inside, but his girlfriend said you could, correct?"

"Correct."

"Mr. Fordyce, why were you there?"

"We heard your client was dealing drugs with a federal fugitive. We wanted to come inside and ask him some questions."

“Isn’t it true you could have asked your questions from the porch?”

“No, it was raining, and we were getting soaked.”

“So you are suggesting there’s an exception to the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against unlawful search that allows unlawful search and seizure when it’s raining?”

Fordyce looks up at Judge Amberlos.

“Judge, do I have to answer that?”

“Listen to the question and try to answer, please,” says the judge.

"Isn't it true you wanted to get inside to plant the gun you found at the murder scene?"

"No. We just wanted to talk."

"You just wanted to talk? Well, your story is that you did much more. In fact, your report says you wound up searching and finding the gun used to kill Judge Pennington's wife. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

“How many guns did you take inside my client’s apartment that night?”

“Two. One. I mean one apiece. My service weapon and Agent Burns’s.”

“So you brought, at least, two guns inside. Are you sure it wasn’t three? You’re sure you didn’t bring the Pennington murder weapon with you to the party?”

“It was two guns total. No need to bring a third. Your client supplied that from under his mattress.”

“How did that happen? How did you wind up under my client’s mattress?”

"Once we were inside we smelled the strong odor of marijuana. We noticed a pipe in the ashtray on the coffee table right there in the living room. It contained a green leafy substance. So we searched the whole apartment and found the gun in the process."

"Now, when you were outside on the porch, could you see this pipe?"

"Objection. Asked and answered," says LaGuardia. No-Guns has stirred. An eyebrow may have raised.

"Overruled."

"Please answer. Could you see the pipe from the porch?"

"I don't think so."

"Well,
did
you see the pipe from the porch?"

"No."

"Did your partner?"

"I never asked."

"Long story short, at the moment you entered my client's living room, you were unaware there was marijuana there, correct?"

"We had our suspicions."

"But you had no evidence your suspicions were accurate, correct?"

"Yes."

"Do you know whether the girlfriend was on the lease?"

"We found out later she was not."

"So, when she consented to you entering, she didn't actually have legal authority to ask you inside, did she?"

"Objection! Calls for a legal conclusion." It is a good objection. I had thought I'd catch Bob napping. But no such luck.

"Sustained. Mr. Gresham, you know better than that."

I do know better.

"Let me rephrase."

"Please do. And move it along. The court is of the opinion you have about exhausted this line of questioning. The jury is waiting, and so am I."

"Rephrasing, you later learned the girlfriend was not on the lease, correct?"

"Correct."

"And she was not a tenant there, correct?"

"Not exactly. She was staying there off and on."

"Counsel," says Judge Amberlos, "I'm going to stop you right there. The jury is anxious, and I'm sure you want argument."

"I don't get to finish my questions?"

"I've heard enough, Mr. Gresham. I'm ready to rule against you. But on the off-chance you can astonish me with your oral argument, please proceed. Please astonish me."

"May it please the court," I say, launching into the ten-thousandth motion to suppress argument of my thirty-year career. I proceed to pound the latest Constitutional law cases, search and seizure rules, opinions and dissents, and Seventh Circuit case law. Then I sit down with a confident look on my face. My knowledge and grasp, while perhaps not totally astonishing, have been compelling. I am convinced that I will prevail. I must prevail: without the planted gun that killed Judge Pennington's wife the government has only the confession. And it was coerced; we have the newly installed gold teeth to prove it.

Bob LaGuardia launches into his counter-argument. He is soft-spoken and intelligent—but in the end, he knows he has a clinker, and he becomes subdued. The visiting girlfriend, who wasn't on the lease, had no legal right to consent to the officers entering the room. Both of us know the judge should suppress.

Judge Amberlos has proved amazingly consistent. Over the past three months, as we've developed this case, I have lost each and every motion I have filed. Judge Amberlos has handed the government win after win after win, until yesterday, when lightning struck, and the judge ruled my client could eat his lunches in the courtroom during trial rather than being returned to the holding cell where the noon fare is bologna and bread. Now he will get real food, the same food the jury is eating, purchased and served by the same U.S. Marshals who oversee the jury as they come and go to lunch. This, I kid you not, is the one motion I have filed that has been granted. The right to eat fried chicken instead of bologna. But the sad part of all this is that my client, with his mental disability, was deliriously happy when I informed him we had won the motion to eat in the courtroom. He began fiercely pumping my hand and throwing his arms around me for a gratitude hug. Which underscores this salient factor: Lamb places so low on all known psychiatric scales that he hasn't understood that we have lost the eighteen other motions I have filed to save him. The stuff that matters just didn't win out. Especially when I argued my motion challenging his competency to stand trial. In the end, we lost that too, which means the government is drawing ever nearer to succeeding in its quest to execute a man who is one point above the cutoff for mental retardation. One IQ point and there would have been no trial; my client would have been adjudicated incompetent and placed in a facility for long-term penal care. One point and we wouldn't be here.

But we are.

With two words the judge rules: “Motion denied.”

My client's confession will be presented to the jury. The gun will be allowed into evidence.

I cast a sad look at James Joseph Lamb. Wearing a suit three sizes too large for him, a suit out of my closet, he understands little of what's being done to his life. I have defended him previously, maybe ten years ago. That was in Judge Pennington's court. Lamb pulled a dime on that one and was out in sixty months. Now, the Assistant U.S. Attorney will tell the jury that Lamb, once he was released, murdered Judge Pennington's wife as payback for the prison time, and here we are.

"You may take your seat," the judge tells Special Agent Fordyce. On his way past my table, Fordyce pauses. He wants to say something to me but restrains himself. The FBI needed a quick conviction for this terrible crime and Nathan Fordyce, and his partner have accommodated them. He exhales and passes me by. He sits beside Bob LaGuardia at the prosecution table, stretches out his arms and legs, and inhales a deep lungful of air, the free kind that you can only get outside of prison walls.