Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (7 page)

"How could that be?" Quintana asked, puzzled.

"It would be foolish of you to lie to me about the pistol. If you do that, I can't help you. I'll get my ass caught in a wringer and so will you. And it'll hurt you a lot more than me."

Quintana looked him in the eye. It was a look he had not shown before: it was slightly menacing.

"If you think," he said in Spanish, "that you can make me say I killed a man, or ever fired that pistol, you are betting on a lame cock. Perhaps, as you say, I must ask the judge for another lawyer."

"Don't get your feathers ruffled," Warren said sternly, gathering up his papers. "I'll be back."

Maximum Gene had told Warren a story of an old mountaineer
who said of his pancakes, "No matter how thin I mix 'em, there's always two sides."

Warren would have to find out the other side of Hector Quintana's pancakes. Unfortunately, the best person to ask under these circumstances was the prosecutor. That was Assistant District Attorney Nancy Goodpaster, to whom Warren had lied four years ago about Virgil Freer's prior convictions.

When he reached the seventh floor and entered the windowless 299th District Court, Judge Lou Parker was calling the roll of defendants and attorneys. "No talking in court," the judge said in her spikiest tone to some women on the rear bench.

Warren caught Nancy Goodpaster's eye and walked back with her to her cool little office next to Parker's chambers. It was crowded with case files and a computer terminal. The desk was neat, and he noticed a photograph of a gray-haired black couple that he assumed were Goodpaster's parents. Their smiles shone proudly in the direction of a four-volume set of the
Texas Prosecutor's Trial Manual.

"The judge is not in a good mood today," Warren said.

Settling herself behind the desk in a steel-backed swivel chair, Goodpaster looked at him calmly. "The judge is in the mood she's always in. We all live with it."

There was an unspoken coda: and unless you're a fool, you'll live with it too.

"She gets things done," Goodpaster added, with what Warren took as a grudging note of apology. "In the 299th we move right along." But again she was also saying: and you'd better move right along with us.

When Goodpaster had been fresh out of law school and had missed Virgil Freer's priors in the case file, she had been soft-faced and fluttery. She had picked the skin off her thumb whenever he talked to her, and the grave air she had projected Warren had taken as a cover-up for her gratitude that she was suddenly being taken seriously as an attorney. Now she was a veteran at the age of thirty, the ranking prosecutor in the 299th. A slim and delicate young woman, she wore her short black hair in a pageboy. She no longer affected the severely tailored suits and oversized bow ties that young female lawyers wear in order to look more like young male lawyers. Today she was dressed in a loose skirt and black blouse and casual light tan jacket. No tie, no rings or jewelry. Her thin hands were steady on the sheaf of papers in front of her. She didn't pick at her thumbs anymore.

"Mr. Blackburn," she said, "I'm looking to settle this case. So let's get down to it."

Five years with Lou Parker and the State of Texas, he thought, and she's a gunfighter.

He nodded at the file on her government metal desk. "What have you got?"

What she had, she said flatly, was a good case. She had motive, opportunity, and possession of the murder weapon.

"Any
Brady
material?" Warren asked.

Brady
material was evidence that might help a defendant or impeach the credibility of a prosecution witness — so named because of
Brady v. Maryland,
wherein the Supreme Court reversed a conviction because the prosecutor had withheld information that might have proved the defendant innocent. You could squeeze more juice from a week-old cut lemon than
Brady
material from the Harris County district attorney's office. Their attitude was: you find it. There were lies of commission and lies of omission, Warren thought. And the state protects its minions.

"Not a thing," Goodpaster said.

The motive for the murder was money. The victim's family would testify that when he left the house that morning, Dan Ho Trunh had more than fifty dollars in his wallet, and it had been established that during the course of that day he had been paid at least ninety dollars in cash for electrical repair work he had done. His wallet had not been found.

As for opportunity, an hour after the murder Hector Quintana had been picked up within a mile of the crime scene. If he had an alibi, it had not yet surfaced.

Warren coughed, said nothing.

Ballistics confirmed that the murder weapon was the same .32-caliber Diamondback Colt clutched in Hector Quintana's hand when he ran out of the Circle K on Bissonet. They had traced the gun and discovered its most recent recorded purchase was five years ago, from a pawn shop in Dallas. The buyer had given phony I.D.

"And when Quintana walked into the Circle K the gun was empty, right?"

Goodpaster nodded. "He was drunk, the police offense report says. Maybe too drunk to think of reloading."

"They gave him a Breathalyzer test?"

"They could smell the booze on him." For the first time since Warren had been in the office, Goodpaster allowed herself to look other than solemn. She said smugly, "Whether Quintana was drunk or not, I could care less. He's not under indictment for D&D or armed robbery of a convenience store. This is capital murder."

Warren leaned back in the wooden chair, making a steeple of his hands. "But you have no witnesses."

"What makes you think so? We have a witness who saw him at the crime scene, and two days later she picked him out of a lineup. Sorry, Mr. Blackburn."

He did not reply, but his face answered her. Goodpaster reached into the file and plucked out a stapled sheaf of papers. She tossed them across the desk to the unhappy defense attorney.

===OO=OOO=OO===

A few days later, once again, Hector Quintana glared at Warren through the metal mesh. The rich brown Indio eyes were eloquent with anger and desolation, but the dark flesh had begun to take on some of the pastiness common to men who saw the sky through sealed grilled windows and breathed artificially chilled air night and day. The eyes would change next: any liveliness would blur. The desolation would remain, but the anger would turn to ennui.

He was doing okay, Hector said. He was working in the kitchen as a dishwasher.

"Don't talk to anyone about the case," Warren warned him. "Jails are full of snitches."

"No one asks me why I'm here." Quintana sounded a little bewildered at that.

"That's jail etiquette. You didn't tell me," he said quietly, "that you'd been in a lineup."

"What is a lineup?"

"The police make you stand with a bunch of other guys facing a mirror. Then they make you stand in profile. Each of you holds up a number."

"Oh," Quintana said wearily, unconcerned. "That happened. I held up Number Five. I didn't know what it meant."

"I thought you said you'd watched a lot of TV."

Quintana glared at him again.

"What happens in a lineup," Warren explained, giving his client the benefit of the doubt, "is that there are people on the other side of the mirror. They can see you but you can't see them. In this instance, there was an Indian woman named Siva Singh on the other side of the glass, and she picked you out. She said, 'That's him.'"

Him
meant the man whom Siva Singh had seen running away from the shopping complex on Wesleyan. Singh had been in the back of the Wesleyan Terrace Laundry & Dry Cleaners, slipping suits and dresses into plastic sheaths. She had heard what she later realized was a gunshot. Coming up to the front of the store a minute or two later, she had noticed a man standing by a station wagon parked in the lot. And the next minute: "My goodness, he was running away very fast."

She rarely went outside in the summer heat unless it was necessary. She went about her business and a few minutes later a customer came in to drop off some dry cleaning. The police offense report noted the customer's name as Rona Morrison, forty-five, a white divorced female, mother of two, who worked as a clerk at Better Buy Motors on Bissonet.

On her way back to her car, Morrison glanced in the window of the station wagon.

Siva Singh heard a scream. She hurried outside and found Morrison on her knees in the parking lot, gagging. Singh then peered inside the station wagon and saw the dead man. She brought Morrison into the store, settled her on a chair, and telephoned 911.

When the HPD squad car arrived, Singh was interviewed by homicide sergeants Hollis Thiel and Craig Douglas. That was when she described the man she had seen running away as "about five feet nine or five feet ten inches tall, with long black hair, and he wore just a pair of trousers with a shirt. He wore no jacket. He looked, if I may say so, to be poor and homeless. He was white, not colored. I thought he might have been Hispanic." She had never seen him before in her life.

Downtown at Harris County Jail the next morning she picked Hector Quintana out of a lineup of six men. "It is most certainly number five."

Warren related most of this to Quintana, whose hair was black and could be described as long.

"What were you wearing that night, Hector, when you held up the Circle K?"

"A shirt and pants."

"No jacket?"

"Was a hot night. My jacket was in my shopping cart."

"Where was the shopping cart?"

"I left it under a stairway near where I found the gun. I was going to return there and get it."

"This is not good." Warren shook his head gloomily. "The Indian woman says it was you she saw running away. Can you explain to me how that's possible? And please think a minute before you answer."

"I doan have to think a minute," Quintana grumbled. "She saw someone else.
Yo no."

"That's your story? That you were never near that station wagon, that dry cleaners? That you never ran away from the shopping center? Understand, I'm not asking if you shot and killed this man — I'm just asking if you ran away from there or any other place. No crime in running away."

The glare intensified. "If you doan believe me—"

"I know, I know. I'm betting on a lame cock." Warren grinned to establish some camaraderie, then let the expression wither. The tough part came now. The dialogue between lawyer and accused client was a process of discovery, a voyage through jagged shoals in stormy weather, often a voyage from obscurity to painful light. The fact of Quintana's denial of guilt was beside the point. Men had been known to deny guilt until the very moment they stepped into the courtroom and saw the grim faces of the jury. Texas juries killed. That was part of their heritage.

"Hector, I hear everything you're telling me. I believe you. But I'm a lawyer, not your mother. I have to look at the evidence, because that's what a jury is going to look at. So… I'm not saying it's true or not, but here's this Indian woman who's going to get on the witness stand and point a finger in your face and state that she saw you running away from the scene of the crime. And the HPD ballistics expert is going to say that the gun you had in your hand an hour after the murder was the gun that killed this Vietnamese man. That's bad, very bad. Do you see all that, Hector?"

Quintana nodded gravely.

"Now, what have I, as your defense lawyer, got to tell the jury? I can't tell them you were somewhere else when the murder was committed, because I can't produce a single live body who can verify it. I can't say you're a peace-loving citizen, because in the first place you're not a citizen, which is neither here nor there, but in the second place you were caught robbing a convenience store with a gun. Not a peace-loving act. You were drunk, but that won't help you. Hector, what I'm trying to tell you is — you are in deep shit.
Mierda profunda,"
he added, translating literally.

This was usually the moment when the defendant lowered his head, gripped the metal mesh until his knuckles turned white, and then said, with immense and bitter effort — because the world was pressing in on him and he finally understood the terrifying price he had to pay for his sins and no doubt his stupidity — "What can you do for me if I plead guilty?"

That Hector Quintana was guilty of murdering Dan Ho Trunh, Warren had almost no doubt. The qualifier was there not only because he liked Quintana — he was all too wary now of the consequences that might arise from liking a client — but because he thought he saw in the man's face a kind of peaceable gravity he had seen on the faces of many poor men in Mexico. Men who might get pissy-eyed drunk on Saturday night and lie down in the cobbled streets and bay at the moon, but not men who would kill unless they were seriously insulted or had a vision that some fool was making a public pass at their woman. No psychotic Mexican climbed to the top of a university tower with a high-powered rifle and sprayed random bullets. None butchered his wife and children and then slit his own throat. There were plenty of murders down there in the drug trade, but usually if men robbed you it was because they were poor — they took your money and split to go home to their Rosa or Carmencita or get drunk with their compañeros. The conquistadors and then the hacienda owners had whipped most of them into a state of subservience. Machismo, which they'd lapped up with their mother's milk, didn't equate with violence.

But there must be exceptions, Warren thought, and maybe Quintana was one of them. The evidence certainly suggested it. As a lawyer, and with the best interests of his client in mind, Warren had to deal with the evidence.

He had one more idea, sprung from his thoughts about the men he had sometimes seen sprawled in the early hours of Sunday morning outside the
cantinas
of San Miguel de Allende.

"Hector, I know that when men get drunk they do things they wouldn't do otherwise. They get crazy. I'm not saying it's true, but maybe you bumped into this Vietnamese guy in that parking lot. Maybe he was a stupid son of a bitch, and he insulted you — said something nasty to you about your being a Mexican, a wetback. Is that possible?" Warren felt his cheeks warm up with enthusiasm. "If it is, then I can get up there and explain a lot of things to the judge" — a picture of Lou Parker on the bench popped into his mind, and quickly he amended that — "or to the jury, because if we plead guilty we have the right to ask for a jury to do the sentencing. And if you're straight with me, and I'm straight with them, the jury will understand why what happened happened ..." Realizing that his client was barely listening, he shrugged. "… if it happened."