Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (8 page)

Quintana said in his soft voice, "There will be a trial?"

Warren ground his teeth. This was some stubborn bastard.

"There can be a trial by jury. Twelve men and women. Your peers. Plain people."

"Can I speak to the jury?"

"You have that right. It will be testimony under oath."

"Then I will tell the jury that it's not true, that this woman makes a mistake, and that I doan ever know this man and doan kill him."

Warren cleared his throat to hold back his impatience, leaning forward to the mesh. "If there's a trial," he said quietly, "and you testify and they find you guilty, the jury will sentence you either to death by cyanide injection or to life in the penitentiary. That's the law. The jury can't deviate."

"But I will tell them, and they will believe me even if you don't. I will tell them," Quintana repeated desperately.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Warren walked at a slow pace through the twisting underground tunnel that connected the Harris County Jail with the courthouse, where he bumped into Myron Moore, a burly fifty-year-old lawyer who always reminded him of Idi Amin. Around the courthouse Moore was called Dr. Doom. He made heavy contributions each year to the campaign funds of nearly all the judges, and if there was a capital murder involving an indigent defendant, Moore was at the top of nearly every judge's list — he would plead anyone guilty and if he was forced to go before a jury he guaranteed the quickest trial possible. The lawyers joked that the Texas Department of Corrections was considering opening a Myron Moore Unit just to house his clients.

Moore stopped him in the tunnel. "I hear you cut me out of a capital in Lou Parker's court. You need any help over there?"

"Not yet, Myron."

"Who's prosecuting?"

"Nancy Goodpaster."

"Play her tough," Moore said. "Don't give her nothing. She's just another dumb ole Texas nigger gal."

Warren frowned but decided not to comment. "What's Scoot Shepard doing in the 181st, Myron?"

"A DWI trial. The mighty have fallen."

"I doubt it. Must be a good fee."

Continuing through the tunnel to the courthouse, thinking about Hector Quintana, Warren felt a barbed pain in the upper part of his back. No fucking wonder. It was a hopeless case. The judge had been clear:
"Don't waste my time. I expect you to plead it out for whatever you can get."
This sorry Mexican is giving me a hard time, Warren thought. And I like the man. I don't want him to die.

It occurred to him then that Hector Quintana had never asked what would happen if he were willing to plead guilty.

Warren would have said, "I can plea-bargain, Hector. The charge that the murder was committed during the course of a robbery is what turns it into capital murder. The prosecutor's not particularly vicious — believe me, there are worse. If you wanted to plead guilty, I could try to get her to reduce the charge to plain murder. Vanilla murder. She'd probably go for it — she knows the judge doesn't want to tie up the court with a long trial. You can get hit with five years probation up to life in prison. The prosecutor will make a recommendation and the judge will buy it. That's the system, that's how it works. I'd try for thirty years. The prisons upstate are crowded, they're fighting for space. You could be out in fifteen years."

If Quintana agreed, that would be a minor blessing for everybody. Warren would be in Lou Parker's good graces. Word would spread. A small start, but still a start. And Quintana would stay alive and one day see his Francisca again.

But if Warren took the case to a jury and they gave his man death, which
seemed an excellent possibility, he would be worse off than when he started.
They would say he had thrown away a defendant's life for the chance to play to
the crowd. Not easy to live with. A lawyer's responsibility in a capital case with powerful state's evidence was to see that the client came out of it alive.

And I can't take it to trial, he thought, reaching the end of the gloomily lit tunnel, pausing at the door to the courthouse. That's the deal with Lou Parker.

He took the elevator up to the 181st on the third floor
, passed the bar and squeezed onto the front bench reserved for lawyers. Again, with Scoot Shepard at work, the courtroom was crowded. The defendant, a thirty-five-year-old bank vice-president with a handlebar mustache, looking debonair but concerned, sat next to Scoot at the defense table. Warren had been right: there was a good fee.

Scoot was in the midst of cross-examining a young police officer with an alert expression on his face. The bank vice-president had been pulled over one night for weaving back and forth on the freeway at an erratic rate of speed. The police officer had asked him to recite the alphabet and the banker had failed to do so accurately.

Scoot asked the officer if
he
knew how to recite the alphabet.

"Yes, I do."

"Would you do it, please, for the benefit of the jury? And may I approach the witness, your honor? I'm just a tad hard of hearing, and I want to make sure I catch every little letter."

With the defense attorney only a few feet away from him and staring intently in his face, the young cop tried his luck. "A-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j-k-1-m-n-o-p-r… ah… p-q-r-s…" Predictably, he blushed. "No, wait a minute, let me start over."

"You must be drunk," Scoot said.

The officer laughed uneasily. "No, sir, I'm not drunk, I'm just temporarily confused."

"And didn't it appear to you on the night of March 5 that my client might also have been confused?"

The officer boldly said, "I'm not confused, I'm nervous. Because you're standing very close to me, sir."

"And weren't you standing close to my client on the night of March 5? And are you nervous the same way someone might be nervous who's stopped at one o'clock in the morning by two Houston police officers who accuse him of being intoxicated when he knows he's not?"

The police officer said, "Your client had no reason to be nervous. But I do."

"Why? You're not going to jail."

"But you're a famous lawyer, and I don't want people to think you can make a monkey out of me. And I
do
know the alphabet."

The judge laughed. The jury laughed. Even the prosecutor grinned.

"I'm sure you know the alphabet. You're a bright man. Pass the witness," Scoot said.

The judge declared a two-hour break for lunch. Scoot immediately came up to Warren, squeezed his hand and said, "Let's trot over to my office. I'll have Brenda send out for sandwiches. These goddam restaurants around here, air-conditioning's so high I get icicles on my nuts."

But five minutes later when they reached Scoot's office on the sixteenth floor of the Republic Bank Building, Warren said, "For God's sake, Scoot, it's five degrees colder here than my refrigerator."

"I'll lend you a shawl, I've got plenty." Marching down the long carpeted corridor, Scoot offered a cheery hello to one of his law clerks. In his office he pulled two cans of Lone Star beer from a diminished six-pack in the little refrigerator behind his desk. The rosewood desk was bare except for a yellow legal pad, a jar of pencils, and several stacked volumes of
Reversible Errors in Texas Criminal Cases.
Brenda was dispatched into the heat for turkey sandwiches and another six-pack. Scoot lit a cigarette, popped the beer can, and dropped with a sigh into his leather armchair.

Scoot had wanted a drink, Warren realized, and not in public. An old tale.

Sixth child of a rag-dealer father and an alcoholic mother, Scoot (born Joseph Howard Shepard) had grown up in Houston's Fourth Ward. A street kid, a carouser, he had put himself through college by running numbers — his nickname came from his speed in delivery — and then law school at the University of Houston. Some years before Warren's father died, Warren had asked him: what
is
Scoot's secret, the one he'll never tell?

"It's no secret at all," Judge Blackburn said. "He just lives by it better than most people. Lawyering is acting, a con game. Assuming his case has some merit, if a lawyer gets a jury to like him and then trust him more than the son of a bitch who's arguing against him, he's home free. Beyond that, Scoot's prepared. And he can size up a witness after he listens to him for five minutes. Knows what it'll take to cozy up to him or get him so mad he'll spit blood. Most people lie on the witness stand, because the greatest human illusion is that we can remember anything accurately. But if Scoot decides a person's basically telling the truth, he can figure out a way to make him doubt what he believes… sometimes doubt what he actually saw. In my court once in a rape case, he kept a poor woman on the stand for a solid week. When she got off, she was destroyed. It was the most masterful job I'd ever seen, because this woman had described the rape in minute detail. And to this day I believe she was telling the truth."

Young Warren had frowned. "Then why'd you let him go on at her for a whole week?"

"Because I was fascinated by what he was doing! He brought three briefcases into court — he knew everything there was to know about this woman's life from the day she was born until the day she took the stand. And he knew everything there was to know about the law on sexual assault. I kept saying, 'Stay away from that, Mr. Shepard, it's not relevant,' and five minutes later he'd be back. I'd interrupt, and he'd come back some other clever way. The prosecutor tried for a while to stop him, then he just sat there and took it up the
culo.
I wouldn't have given old Scoot a cut dog's chance in this case — and by God, he won an acquittal!"

His father's vision of the trial process made Warren uncomfortable. A battle, a joust between opposing counsel, where each victory is sweet and each defeat adds zest to the next challenge. In law school Warren had understood that most trial lawyers yearned to win — and so did he. Cross-examination was the ultimate confrontation, the gunfight that left either lawyer or witness bleeding in the dust. The great trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes had once said, "I continue to dream of the day when I am examining a witness and my questions are so probing and so brilliant that the fellow blurts out that he, not my defendant, committed the foul murder. Then he will pitch forward into my arms, dead of a heart attack."

But there had to be more, Warren thought. More than adversaries and great actors, lawyers should be the standard-bearers of what was decent and fair. Should be, but rarely were: for they were born and shaped as human before they could be turned into lawyers.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The whites of Scoot's huge black eyes seemed more bloodshot than ever and beneath them were dark yellowish circles where the skin was drawn tight, as if he might have liver trouble or had undergone cosmetic surgery. He was probably sixty-five years old, but his hair was still full and black. Transplanted and dyed, Warren figured, but with flair, leaving small silver-gray wings above the ears.

Scoot lowered the can of Lone Star. "What do you know about the Dr. Ott case? And my client, Johnnie Faye Boudreau?"

Warren wondered for a moment why Scoot would want to discuss it with him. But he said, "Whatever I read in the
Chronicle,
and I was there in court when she pled poverty and you got the bail reduced to a hundred grand. And of course I remember the Underhill murder."

Between pulls at the can of beer and puffs on his cigarette, Scoot gave him a synopsis.

The victim, Clyde Ott, had been a successful Houston gynecologist. In his early thirties he had married one of his patients, Sharon Underhill, the forty-year-old widow of an oil-and-gas baron and the mother of two teenaged children. With Sharon's money Dr. Ott built the Houston Woman's Clinic, the Ott Clinic for alcoholics, the Underhill Clinic for drug addicts, and then a series of expensive retirement homes with small medical units attached. There was a waiting list to get into all of them.

"I knew Clyde Ott," Scoot said. "We met now and then at dinner parties, and one of my nephews spent some time in the Underhill Clinic to get rid of a little cocaine habit. Before Clyde married Sharon he'd fucked more women in Harris County than the whole Houston Astro infield put together. Marriage didn't stop him. When he got to be a wealthy entrepreneur he still kept up his gynecological practice — he liked pussy and that was the fastest way to meet it. But his main squeeze in recent years was Johnnie Faye Boudreau. You saw her in the courtroom. Quite a woman. She runs a topless bar out on the strip behind the Galeria. Maybe she owns it, maybe she doesn't — who really knows? Won a couple of beauty contests when she was younger, then became a model, then a dancer. Couple of brothers got killed in Vietnam — she talks about them all the time. Married twice, no kids. First husband, musician of some kind, she divorced on grounds of nonsupport. Second husband was a drug dealer and ex-con. She divorced him after he got sentenced to a thirty-year bit over in Austin. That was just after she took up with Clyde Ott."

Almost two years ago, on a sunny October morning, Clyde's wife, Sharon Underhill Ott, was shot down in a parking lot on her way to an aerobics class. A high-powered rifle had done the killing. A man in a black Lincoln town car was seen speeding away from the scene. Clyde Ott was in San Diego at the time, at a medical convention. Johnnie Faye Boudreau was visiting her mother down in Corpus Christi. Airtight alibis.

"Johnnie Faye had another part-time boyfriend then," Scoot said, "called Dink, because his real name was David Inkman. He was an assistant manager at her club, an ex-Marine. Did some time up at Huntsville for assault and battery. Dink drove a black Lincoln town car. Naturally, considering the close relationship between Clyde and Johnnie Faye, Dink fell under suspicion. But he had an alibi too. A couple of hookers swore he'd got drunk with them the night before, slept over at their house and stayed till noon. They swore his Lincoln was parked in their garage. HPD never could pick up a tire tread in the parking lot to match Dink's white-walls, and they never did find the murder weapon. Case closed."