Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (10 page)

His response was to lift the poker like a baseball bat. She yelled,
"Don't!"
— but the drunken fool kept coming. And in her panic she pulled the trigger. The .22, when it was manufactured in 1928, had been a semiautomatic pistol, automatically ejecting the cartridge case of a fired round and loading the next cartridge from the magazine into the chamber. But long ago some previous owner had filed down the sear, the pivoted internal piece that held the hammer cocked, thus making the pistol fully automatic. She'd forgotten about that, she said. That was the tragic part. She couldn't stop it from firing three shots.

Believe it or not, he still took a swing at her with the poker. When she raised her head cautiously she saw him tumbling onto the white sofa. He was probably dead when he took the swing, because although one bullet missed, one of the other two had hit him between the eyes and the other in the chest.

There was an old saying in Texas:
God made men, Smith & Wesson made them equal.

Scoot asked, What about the safety?

She must have released it without thinking when she grabbed the gun out of her handbag.

And did she know it was illegal to file down that sear?

"
I
didn't do it," she explained.

She didn't scream. Clyde lay on his knees, head pillowed on the sofa, one arm dangling to the carpet. She never touched the body. She became aware that the TV was on in the next room. Probably Lorna had left it on. She walked in there and turned it off in the middle of a Johnny Carson monologue.

From the telephone in the TV room she dialed 911, gave her name and the address in River Oaks, and said, "I just killed a man. He was about to assault me, and I shot him. Please come and help…"

She told a briefer version of that tale to the Homicide detectives when they arrived at the house. A copy of her statement was in the file. She was always consistent in the details. If there's no one to contradict her, Warren thought, we'll win this case. Can't lose unless Scoot goes to sleep in the courtroom, and that had never happened.

At home that evening he warmed up last night's chicken gumbo in the microwave, fed Oobie a mix of Purina Chow and raw ground chuck and corn oil, then spread the papers on the living room couch. He read the file a second time, until midnight, then went to bed. Charm hadn't come home: of late she had her own social life, a gang of friends from the TV station, a separate schedule.

She was there in the morning, asleep beside him, blond hair tangled on the pillow. He studied her face. He had loved it for eight years and knew it down to the tiny scar where the branch of a blueberry bush had hooked the corner of her mouth when she was thirteen. Warren understood that at first we love the illusion of perfection. Later we come to love imperfections, because they signal vulnerability: and what we love, we yearn to protect.

He wanted to talk to her. The oath of confidentiality, he believed, did not extend to man and wife. And she had always helped him to see more clearly. She looked pale, puffy around the eyes. But she treasured her sleep in the morning, and he didn't wake her.

Running with Oobie along the bayou, heels pounding the concrete in stoic rhythm, he came to a decision. Working with Scoot on the Ott case was the major leagues, and he had earned the chance without even realizing it. He had lost self-esteem, had toiled like a humble peasant in the fields of the law, and finally it had paid off. He was going to do a good job. Going to prevail.

But he couldn't live a divided life. Two murder trials were one too many. Get rid of
Quintana,
he concluded. Be an intelligent lawyer and face facts. Stop being sorry for the poor bastard — he's guilty. Plead him out, fast.

The next day in Judge Bingham's court, Warren was
registered as co-attorney of record for the defendant in
The State of Texas v. Johnnie Faye Boudreau.
He shook hands with a dark-suited Bob Altschuler, whose grip was like that of a heavyweight wrestler trying for an armlock.

"Congratulations," the prosecutor rumbled. "Let's sit down and cut a deal. You know this woman's a fucking mad serial killer — you
know
that, for Christ's sake, don't you? She's out of her tree! I gather you think I'm a cross between Pontius Pilate and Attila the Hun, but, my boy, I know what I'm talking about here. She's got the morals of a rat. She's a cannibal, a homicidal maniac!" He refused to let go of Warren's hand; he needed a captive audience. "She owns that nightclub — this corporation in Louisiana is just a shell with some fucking Cajun second cousin fronting for her. It won't come up in court, but she knocked off Ott's wife and the guy who did it for her and the guy who knocked off
that
guy, and we think that back in '82 just on the spur of the moment she offed some Korean kid who worked in her club as a chef's assistant and gave her some back talk when she wouldn't give him a raise — told her she was crazy. You think I'm kidding? I
know.
And God alone knows who else before that. With this broad, murder is a way of working out problems and settling scores. You want to do a service to society, help me put her away, at least until she's too old to do more damage. Tell your partner I'll settle for fifty years."

Warren sighed. "Are you finished? Can I go?"

"You think I'd lie to you?"

"You might have a tendency to exaggerate."

"You don't believe any of it?"

"It's not for me to believe or disbelieve," Warren said. "It's for you to prove it. Do your job and stop wasting my time." He managed to shake his hand loose from Altschuler's, but his fingers were bright red and the bones ached.

He walked briskly up the stairs to Judge Parker's court. The jury box was full of lawyers waiting for appointments. Three days ago, Warren thought, I'd have been with them.

He drew Nancy Goodpaster off into a private corner of the hallway. Deals were cut everywhere, some even in the courthouse toilets.

"Cards on the table, Nancy. What will you give if Hector Quintana pleads out?"

"Is that what he wants?"

"He says he didn't do it. Whether it's true or not, I need something to offer him."

"What do
you
want, Warren?"

Now that she thinks she can whip the case through the docket and get a pat on the back from Lou Parker, she calls me by my first name. He pretended to think for a while.

"Reduce the charge to vanilla murder. Twenty years. Drop the charges of armed robbery and possession of a weapon."

"You're wasting my time, counselor." Nancy Goodpaster looked at her gold wristwatch. But Warren knew she had nowhere more important to go.

"The Siva Singh I.D. won't stand up."

"I think it will."

"It was dark in that parking lot outside the dry cleaners. I checked it out. No decent street light. There are a thousand guys who have black hair and wear shirts and trousers on a summer night. I don't think Singh really saw the man's face."

"She claims she did."

"Nancy, what makes it a capital is the assumption of robbery. So tell me — what did Quintana do with the hundred and fifty bucks from Trunh's wallet? He didn't have it on him when he robbed the Circle K. Even if he threw the wallet into a trash can, he didn't throw the money away with it, did he? Who'd believe that? You can't make capital murder stick." He waited a moment. "You want to settle this, don't you?"

"Naturally."

"Then give a little. Give with a good heart."

"Fifty years."

"My man will never buy it. He has no record. He's had jobs, he's not a vagrant. He's a simple Mexican
campesino.
A wife and kids back home — his father gave him a donkey for a wedding present. He's not a murderer."

"He killed, that makes him a murderer."

"You know what I'm talking about."

"And it doesn't make any difference. Murderers have wives and kids. I knew one used to rescue lame dogs from the pound. I remember one who raised pet squirrels. So now I know one who has a donkey. Jesus, Warren…" She sighed. "You feel sorry for him, that's all. Another poor slob, like that guy in the Kmart case. Well, maybe if he were my client, I'd feel sorry for him too."

Good. He was getting somewhere. She had a heart. He liked her for it.

"And if Quintana gets up there on the witness stand," Warren said, "the jury's going to feel sorry for him too. He's not surly, he's not mean, he's not a bad man. He's got pride and dignity and it all shows. A jury will never go for the capital. And if they find him guilty of the lesser offense, they'll give him considerably less than life."

"Forty years," Goodpaster said. "My final offer."

"You're a hard woman."

"No, I'm doing my job. Like you're doing yours." She seemed upset at the accusation.

"You'll drop the charge of armed robbery?"

"I'll think about it, Warren. Now I have to go. Have a nice weekend."

Warren sighed. He hoped he was masking his feeling of triumph. He was saving a man's life.

===OO=OOO=OO===

In his office late the following Monday afternoon, Scoot Shepard asked, "You know the statute on self-defense?"

Warren nodded, frowning. "And I know there was a provision engrafted in the penal code back in '74 that calls for 'the duty to retreat.'"

"You're on target." In one hand Scoot held a cigarette, in the other a glass of bourbon on the rocks. Whenever the sun threatened to dip below the yardarm, Scoot switched from Lone Star to Wild Turkey.

"Seems to me," Warren said, "that one question a prosecutor might ask a jury to focus on is this: if Clyde Ott was drunk and abusive that night, why did Johnnie Faye Boudreau even enter the house with him? Why did she go upstairs? And when she first came downstairs from the bedroom, why didn't she just go out the door before he blocked her path? Did she retreat
sufficiently?
And if Clyde had fractured her cheekbone once before and she believed him to be violent — why was she still seeing him? If her story's true, he once said in front of two witnesses that he would kill her. That's superficially good for us, but it's got a flip side. The state will say that's why she carried the gun in her handbag on a dinner date. They'll call it premeditation."

"True, true." Scoot smiled delicately. "Of course that all depends on how the lady tells it when she testifies. It boils down to credibility. Don't fret too much about 'the duty to retreat.' All those Yankee lawyers come to practice here when oil was up at thirty-five dollars a barrel, they rammed that down the throat of the state legislature. They were looking to bring Texas into the twentieth century, so to speak, juristically. Pissing against the wind. This is still Texas. People pack guns and everybody thinks he's the fucking second cousin of Wyatt Earp. Bravery and loyalty and honor and duty — we're eaten up with that stuff. No man has to back down in the face of a threat. That's the basis of self-defense, regardless of what the law says about a goddam duty to retreat."

Warren remembered that Texas had the longest history of frontier warfare of any state in the Union. Its citizens were tied to guns and blood and the Alamo, backs always against the wall. He also remembered the Texas paramour statute that held it was not an offense to kill your wife's lover. It had been stricken from the books about twenty years ago, but the law still stated that if you heard from a reliable source that somebody was out to get you, you had the right to arm yourself, go forth, and seek an explanation.

"Let me tell you a story," Scoot continued. "My first murder case, nearly forty years ago. My client, a guy named Whitey Garcia, walked in and shot his wife and her boyfriend to death while they sat calmly drinking a beer in a bar in the Third Ward. Purely intentionally. He walked up to them and asked his wife what she was doing. The other guy, whose name was Ramos, butted in and said, 'She ain't doin' nothin'.' Whitey whipped out a nine-millimeter pistol and shot him in the stomach. His wife jumped up, screamed, ran across the bar. He shot her in the back. Then he shot Mr. Ramos again in the head. Stuck the gun back in his belt and marched out of the bar.

"The state was offering Whitey Garcia sixty years in prison to a plea of guilty of the murder of his wife. They didn't care about Ramos. We turned it down and I tried the case to a jury. They found Whitey guilty. Gave him ten years pen time, came over and shook his hand and told him they'd done the best they could for him, and if he just hadn't gone so danged far as to kill his wife, they'd have let him go."

Scoot refilled his glass from the quart bottle of Wild Turkey.

"What I'm saying is, you have no duty to retreat. Now, some great advances
have been made in recent years regarding the rights of the fairer sex. Equal opportunity, equal wages, no goosing in the office, and so forth. My theory of defense is this: in our enlightened age, why should a Texas woman have to retreat any more than a man should? Especially when the son of a bitch needed killing. I want to sell that theory to the jury and walk my client right out of Dwight Bingham's courtroom, just like Whitey Garcia walked out of the bar."

A women's rights case.
Dear Jesus, hear my plea.
Warren clucked his tongue. If anyone could do it, Scoot could.

He said to the older lawyer, "You think Johnnie Faye's story is true?"

"Hard to say. So far it's all I've got to work with. I want you to talk to her, then go nosing around and talk to anyone else you have to. And then talk to her again until she's sick of the sound of your voice. Find out where we can be hurt. When I go before that jury, I don't want any unpleasant surprises."

"When do I meet her?"

Scoot looked at his Rolex. "In about two hours. We're all going to the Dome for the Astro game — you and me and Johnnie Faye and her new boyfriend. Her idea, her treat. Baseball bores the crap out of me. But between innings, you can get to know the lady."

Warren reached for the telephone. "I just have to make a phone call and break a dinner date." While he punched out the number he said, "Scoot, if we pick any Spanish-speaking people for the jury, I wouldn't have Johnnie Faye get up there and tell them her favorite Mexican song."