Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (24 page)

"Go to Nancy Goodpaster or Lou Parker. You have a duty to try and save Hector's ass."

Warren slammed a fist on the grass. "Don't you think I know that? Parker would have a fucking orgasm if she thought she could get me disbarred for violating privilege. Nancy will say, 'That's all well and good, counselor, but how do I know you're telling the truth? Where's your proof? What am I supposed to do, Mr. Blackburn, drop a case because you say someone other than your client is guilty? The facts indicate otherwise. There's possession of the gun. There's positive I.D. by an eyewitness. Nice try, counselor.'"

Warren sniffed at the scent of roses brought by an early evening breeze. It brought no pleasure. "I'm going to withdraw from
Quintana,"
he said, standing pale in the last sunlight.

"And you think Hector's going to understand what you're telling him, and why you're bowing out right in the middle of voir dire?"

"No, he won't," Warren said.

"Parker will appoint someone like Myron Moore. Myron will plead your guy out for forty years before you can say jackshit. Can you live with that?"

"I can't live with any of it," Warren groaned.

"I don't know what to tell you, except not to let Johnnie Faye know you talked to me. She'll freak out. We don't need that."

Warren left the park no wiser than when he had entered it.

That evening in his apartment he thought, my obligation is not only to my client Hector Quintana, and to my client Johnnie Faye Boudreau, and to the canons of ethics and to the rule of law — above all, it's to my conscience. An agnostic on the question of where ultimate truth lay, Warren nevertheless felt himself committed to a process untainted by false or incomplete disclosure. Once again he remembered the Freer case. He had thought, until now, that he had learned his lesson. With Virgil Freer he had broken the rules and countenanced fraud by lying. Here, if he
obeyed
the rules, he would countenance fraud by silence.

That struck him as mildly insane.

I can violate confidentiality, he decided. I can go to Charm, and if she can't do anything, to the rest of the media — I can disclose what I know.
I'm giving up my practice. I wouldn't do that if I weren't telling you the truth. Help this man!
And they might headline it, exploit it as juicy news.

But how would that help Hector? The jury had taken an oath to decide Hector's guilt or innocence based on the evidence alone. That oath would not change.

The law, Warren thought bitterly, protects us from barbarism, and in its place gives us the barbarism of the law.

I can violate confidentiality, yes, and I will…
if there's a purpose.
If there's no purpose, there's no sense. I can't desert Hector Quintana now. I know things that no other lawyer could ever know. There's no answer to this, no decent solution. Day to day. Stick with it. Stick with both cases. Wait, like a lion in the brush, for the prey to show itself and make a mistake. Stick close to her, for the same reason she wants to stick close to me, and see what happens.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the Dark Ages, guilt or innocence was often resolved by having the accused walk barefoot and blindfolded over nine red-hot plowshares laid lengthwise at unequal distances. If he was burned, he was declared guilty.

Not much had changed, Warren thought.

Less than twenty-four hours after he knew who had murdered Dan Ho Trunh, he and Nancy Goodpaster had begun to pick the jury that would decide the life or death of Hector Quintana. He had little faith that you could predict what any individual juror would do. You could eliminate a few obvious killers, the devout Lutherans and the thin-lipped retirees who assumed, no matter how the judge lectured them, that the defendant was guilty until proved innocent. The prosecutor would strike the obvious bleeding hearts. Beyond that, Warren operated on a simple principle: if you don't like a juror's face, chances are he doesn't like yours — better get rid of him. If they keep smiling at you, take them. He often asked, "If you were the accused, would you want someone like yourself on this jury?" It usually worked: before his years of court-appointed plea bargaining he had won more than his fair share of trials. He was a little rusty now, but it would all come back.

Defense and prosecution were each allotted a set number of peremptory strikes — disqualification of jurors with no reason given. Goodpaster used most of her strikes to eliminate Hispanics. On his part Warren had made up his mind not to let any Asians on the jury, but none were in the panel. He wanted young jurors. He theorized that the young ones would have more sympathy for an illegal alien, a member of the new legion of homeless. If sympathy mattered, if sympathy could overpower evidence, if it wasn't a matter of a blind man dodging red-hot plowshares.

On the first morning Warren took Hector to the rear of Judge Parker's courtroom and said, "Listen carefully. Lawyers don't usually give a rat's ass if a client is guilty or not guilty. We just do the best we can. It's actually better if you believe your client did it. If the jury convicts him, you think, well, so what? The rotten son of a bitch got what he deserved."

He didn't add that if you believe your man is innocent, it tears your heart out when the jury doesn't believe you.

Hector blinked a few times.

"I
know
you didn't do it," Warren said.

Hector nodded in silence. Cold comfort, Warren realized, on your way to prison or death row. But it was all that Warren could offer.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the midst of voir dire he had taken Maria Hahn to an Italian restaurant for dinner. "I haven't done anything about replacing the camera, but I will. I promise. I'm not quite with it these days. I'm feeling a little crazy."

Maria waved her hand in dismissal, rosy fingernails glittering in candlelight. Later, outside the restaurant, Warren kissed her on the cheek fraternally and said good night.

Two days after that, at noon, he bumped into her in a crowded courthouse elevator. She clasped his arm. "You look awful," she whispered. "I'll buy you lunch. Cheer you up."

Nothing dark or desperate or depressing about lovely Maria Hahn. She could pick her affairs, if that's how she wanted to play the game. Then what did she want from him? Friendship? Company? What he wanted too. A perfect match for this macabre season of his thirty-fifth year. If his loins stirred, he had that under control. But he sensed a
naivet� in his thinking. "Independence," Charm had once said, "is an unnatural state for any woman with intelligence and normal DNA."

A day at a time in this too. Don't say anything you don't mean. If you don't know what you mean, then shut up. That seemed a decent enough formula for survival when your wife was divorcing you and you were swimming upstream to save the life of a client you knew beyond all doubt was innocent.

He reached for the check at lunch. "I invited you," Maria reminded him.

"Too late."

"I want my Pentax."

"Give me until Friday night."

"It's a date — I'll take you to dinner. And leave your money at home."

The
Quintana
jury was picked and sworn by Thursday. It comprised seven men and five women: seven were white, five were black, half were under thirty. Warren was guardedly pleased, but he knew that from the moment a jury is sworn it becomes a new creature with its own separate life.

Judge Parker instructed the jurors not to discuss the case among themselves or even with family, and to be in court by 8:30 A.M. Monday.

The next day Warren stopped at a discount camera store and bought the Pentax, then lugged his heavy briefcase up to Arthur Franklin's law firm on the thirtieth floor of the Texas Commerce Tower. Charm's lawyer was in his sixties, a man with a smooth face and clear eyes, dressed in a gray suit, blue chalk-striped shirt, red power tie: a Texan who had gone to Harvard. His office smelled of wood polish, Havana cigars, and tax-free bonds. Maybe, Warren thought, I should have gone into civil law. I'd be bored, but I wouldn't lose so fucking much sleep. I wouldn't have to deal with murderers and scumbags and accused innocent men.

"You're an attorney, Mr. Blackburn. You know these matters are never pleasant, but they needn't be acrimonious." Arthur Franklin followed with the short form of the standard divorce lawyer's speech. In the end Warren agreed to all of Charm's terms. There was nothing to argue about. But he felt rotten all over again. A part of his life was ending. Had ended. In the elevator he shook his head, bewildered. A woman in the elevator looked at him, then took a defensive step backward. Warren realized he had clenched his fists and his lips were drawn back in a silent snarl.

No fucking wonder.

He went home to shower and feed Oobie, and at eight o'clock he met Maria Hahn at a French restaurant in River Oaks. Warren looked at the menu and said, "Do you mind if I ask you something gauche? Can you afford this?"

"Sure," Maria said. "Not all the time, but life is short."

She was paid a salary for her normal day in Judge Bingham's court, she explained, but by the page for extra work. She did best when there were appeals that required the entire record, or big cases with well-heeled clients like drug dealers whose lawyers requested day-by-day expedited transcripts of testimony. She had a second stenograph machine at home in her spare bedroom. Sometimes she worked until midnight. "The kid has to go to college one day. He says he wants to be a doctor, and you know what that costs since Reagan fucked up the scholarship program. Randy's a smart boy. I was thinking of the Ivy League. Penn or Cornell."

"A little early for that, isn't it?"

"You have to plan ahead."

"My wife went to Penn," Warren said.

Maria smiled easily. "Good for her."

After espresso, the restaurant offered a snifter of Remy Martin to honor the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day. Warren lifted his glass. "To independence."

Maria paid the bill with a Visa card and said, "Let's have the other half at my house. I own a whole bottle of Courvoisier. We'll celebrate the revolution the way the French do."

She lived nearby in an English Tudor condo tucked behind Westheimer, just inside the Loop. Following her there in his car, Warren came to the conclusion that it would have been churlish and unfriendly to say no. Just one drink. All the way there he thought about Hector Quintana and Johnnie Faye Boudreau.

Maria's son was spending a month with his grandparents over in Austin. Maria put some Spanish guitar music on the tape deck, turned the volume low, kicked off her shoes, then dropped down next to Warren on the living room sofa. The room was cool and lighted with the discreet glow of two table lamps. The drink warmed him, the sofa was soft; like any stray, his response to these comforts was instantaneous. Extracting the half-finished glass of cognac from his hands, Maria set it on the coffee table. Her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack. She leaned toward him and kissed him. He was taken by surprise — but not really. He had seen it coming. Just one kiss.

But the kiss continued and Warren enjoyed it beyond expectation. She was a beautiful woman, he believed. He had always admired her oddly tilted Modigliani neck. The veins of its slender arch pulsed under his fingertips. He began to kiss it, running his lips from top to bottom and then up again, touching all its quadrants while she shuddered against him. She wore no bra, and he could feel that her breasts were round, soft but growing firmer against his chest. From beyond expectation he moved to beyond reason. Still…

"Maria—"

"Oh, shut up," she said quietly. "I promise it won't hurt. Let's just do it."

===OO=OOO=OO===

Warren left her condo at six o'clock on Saturday morning and drove to Ravendale, where he fetched his briefcase and Oobie and a sack of dog food. He drove back quickly on the empty freeway. From beyond reason he had passed to a state that was beyond control. Maria's bed was queen-sized, with half a dozen plump down pillows in frilled, peach-colored pillowcases. He had wondered if he would have a problem, if Charm would intrude. He had wondered too if Maria had wondered.

"Let's just fuck till we're dead," Maria said.

Stop wondering. This woman is accommodating, and her body is warm. She's lighthearted and alive. And today, for a change, so am I.

They stayed in bed most of the day with the blinds drawn, the cool air blowing. He could not remember when he had made love with this kind of energy and uncomplicated wantonness. He gave the credit to Maria, but he was pleased with himself. What traps life springs on us. And what pleasure it offers when we don't think too much, don't deny and don't lie.

In the late afternoon, when he took Oobie for a run, Maria went out to rent videos of
Jean de Florette
and
Manon of the Spring.
Warren had never seen either movie. For Maria it was the third time. Nevertheless, tears sprang to her eyes on and off during the four hours.

"Let's not go out again," she decided. "Let's hide our watches and the clock."

She called a nearby mall to order a pizza and two cold six-packs. During the night she slept against his back, leaving a cool layer of sweat from shoulder blades to thighs. There were pizza crumbs under the pillows.

On Sunday morning she brought trays of eggs benedict and cappuccino to the bed. "My culinary specialty," she said.

"I know what your real specialty is, Hahn."

"No, Blackburn, you don't."

In mid-morning, when he propped himself up against the pillows and tried to work his way yet again through the
Quintana
file, she showed him. Later he asked, "Have you got anything to read?" She admitted she was in the middle of a novel by Jackie Collins — it lay on the carpet beside the bed. While she clutched it to her flushed face, heaving cries that made Oobie rush in from the kitchen in alarm, as if firecrackers had gone off, Warren returned the favor.

When it began to grow dark he slipped out from under the sheet and pulled his watch from the bureau drawer. Feeling wonderfully decadent, drained, boneless, he dressed slowly. Maria announced that she was going to stay there in bed. Sleep till morning.