Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (16 page)

Two maybes. A human life depended on them.

Maybe Hector had done it. Drunk, unable to remember, blocking out the horror now because he couldn't believe it was possible. The thought was like a block of ice pressed unremittingly against Warren's spine.

On the TV screen he saw Scoot Shepard, doused in brilliant white halogen light, talking to reporters outside some courtroom. Smiling liberally yet elfishly, as Scoot always smiled. Surprised, Warren leaned forward from the couch. Had the state dropped the charge against Johnnie Faye for lack of evidence? But he quickly deduced that it was an old clip from the news file. Scoot was younger. Looked healthier.

Warren hit the mute button to regain the sound.

Voice-over, in her gravest tones, Charm said: "… so at the age of sixty-four, a great Texas lawyer is dead. The man who successfully defended sex doctor Martha Sachs, oil billionaire John R. Baker, and Mafia overlord Nick 'the Horse' Fellino could not defend himself against the twisting curves and late-afternoon sun of Memorial Drive. A preliminary medical report indicates that Mr. Shepard was driving while intoxicated and suffered a minor cerebral stroke just prior to the fatal accident. We'll have an update on Channel 26 Eleven O'Clock News. Don?"

"Tonight at the Astrodome," Don Benson said, "the stumbling Houston Astros will go with hard-luck pitcher Jim Clancy in an effort to salvage a win in the final game of the series with the New York Mets…"

Hard to believe, even harder to digest and accept. Warren punched over to the networks, but they also were doing weather and sports. He turned off the TV. The silence of the house fell like thunder about his ears.

Warren paced the room. Scoot, you poor bastard. He moaned aloud, surprising himself.

He hadn't spent enough time with Scoot to mourn him. But he had known him, respected him, even liked him. Death was so elusive: in the courthouse you dealt with the details and consequences of death but not the fact itself. As a boy Warren had wondered: if I die, what will I feel? But there won't be an
I
anymore. Nothing to feel. No point of view. As a man he wondered too. No answer came. He heard Scoot's drawling voice. No more, other than in memory.

And now the Ott case… the best shot of my life, gone. Gone with Scoot. He finished his drink and poured another one.

Johnnie Faye Boudreau would have to pick a new lawyer. One of the old dogs with plenty of experience and clout, although none of it would equal Scoot's. The chances of that lawyer's asking Warren to sit second chair were zero. They all had people they worked with. If Scoot's boys hadn't been tied up on the antitrust case, Warren thought, he never would have asked me in the first place.

When he was first starting out as a lawyer Warren had pinned two hand-lettered notes to the bulletin board above his desk. One said:
Never assume.
The other said:
If you prepare, what you're worrying about won't happen
—
but something else always will.
Over the years the sun had faded the slogans and finally he had crumpled them and thrown them out. I should have tattooed them on my wrists, he thought.

He waited up for Charm. In all his life, not since the first day his mother had left him at the schoolyard, he couldn't remember feeling this abandoned. He didn't eat, just drank more vodka tonics and finished what was left of a jar of salted peanuts. At midnight, a little dazed and brain-weary, he went to bed. He was almost asleep when the telephone rang. He snatched the receiver from the cradle and said, "Charm? Are you okay?"

But it was Johnnie Faye Boudreau. She sounded frightened; she was blubbering. Warren had trouble understanding her words. Finally he realized that she was at the club, and someone had been listening to the late news on a car radio and had just told her of the tragedy.

Warren heard laughter in the background. Johnnie Faye's voice rose in pitch. "What am I going to do?"

"You're going to calm down," Warren said firmly, "and in the next few days you're going to find a new lawyer to take the case. The judge will grant a postponement of the trial date, the new lawyer will have plenty of time to prepare. It will work out just fine. You have a good case. Any decent lawyer can win it, I promise you."

"I want Mr. Shepard!" she cried.

"That will be a little difficult," Warren said.

"Can I see you? Can I talk to you? I need your advice."

"Yes, of course."

"I mean
now
."

"I'll be at the club in twenty minutes."

In a garden restaurant near the courthouse
, Warren lunched with Judge Dwight Bingham. Wandering through the heat, a breeze brought to their nostrils the fragrance of dog roses and star jasmine. Warren had come back from the Ecstasy club at three o'clock in the morning and had risen at six-thirty. He had gone to his office, where he read through the
Boudreau
case file and pored over law books and then called the court at 8 a.m., just a few minutes before the judge began his docket.

Bingham lifted a forkful of blackened catfish to his mouth. He had been born on a plantation near Texarkana and had worked ten years as a bailiff before he finished putting himself through law school. A long journey, and he had seen a great deal happen.

"It's you I'm worried about, young Warren. Bob Altschuler's an awfully good prosecutor. He'll run for judge in November. This is a big case, maybe his last big one. He'll fight like hell to win it."

"So will I," Warren said flatly.

"If you lose, you'll look bad. Especially after that affidavit thing that happened with you and Lou Parker."

"Old hat," Warren said.

But he knew it wasn't. He had ordered a creole fish salad, but he had no appetite. Nevertheless he toyed with the food, pretending to be involved with it.

"I can handle it," he said at last. "Scoot and I had three or four meetings and I have a copy of the full file. I'll try it just about the way he would. Look, Judge, the Boudreau woman thinks she wants me. That's what matters."

He hadn't asked her. He hadn't pressured. Last night at Ecstasy she had said at least four times, "I don't know what to do," and Warren had kept repeating that she didn't need to make a snap decision. She could ask around town — any lawyer would take the case. It was a good case, he stressed. She would only have to testify to the truth. Only a fool could lose such a case.

"You have faith in me?" Johnnie Faye asked.

Did he have faith in
her?
What an odd way to put it.

"If you told the truth to Scoot," Warren answered carefully, "and you keep on telling the truth to whomever you pick as your new lawyer, I have faith in your defense."

"Could you win my case?"

"Yes, I could."

"
Would
you win it?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Shepard was the smartest lawyer in town," Johnnie Faye said, "may he rest in peace. He picked you to work with him, so you have to be good too. He told me more or less what happened to you a few years ago — he said you'd do anything for a client but you just went too far that time. He said you were one of the best young lawyers he knew of. Real smart, real quick, and you worked hard. I think you're smart too, except maybe in your love life. But I've noticed that a lot of very bright people aren't too bright when it comes to all that emotional stuff. Maybe they don't have time to think things through. If I asked you to take the case, would you?"

"Yes," Warren said.

"I want to get this over with. I don't want the trial postponed, it's hanging over my goddam head like a sword. I can't sleep nights. So let me think it over. I'm tired now. I don't know what to do."

"You'll do the right thing," Warren told her.

In the garden restaurant, Judge Bingham frowned and touched a cold glass of iced tea to his sagging cheeks. "Why don't you tell her to get someone like Myron Moore, and you sit second chair to Myron?"

"Because Myron is lazy. I can run rings around him. Come on, Judge. You
know
that."

"When will Ms. Boudreau give you an answer?"

"I'm meeting her again tonight at Ecstasy."

"I want to tell you something, Warren. Off the record." The old judge let out a soft sigh. His face seemed compounded of shiny brown lumps and sallow slack folds. "You quote me on this, I'll call you a liar. You were there that day in court, the hearing for reduction of Ms. Boudreau's bail. All that business about the Louisiana corporation owning that club, her having no money, that was bullshit. I knew it, couldn't prove it, didn't want to be bothered. That's a clever woman. Gets what she wants, twists people around. You watch yourself, son. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"I haven't in years," Warren said truthfully.

He paid the bill over the judge's protests and left the restaurant. To defend Johnnie Faye Boudreau was literally the chance of a lifetime, like Rocky Balboa getting a shot at the heavyweight crown. But if Johnnie Faye said yes, Warren realized, he would be trying two murder cases back to back. The pressure would never let up, he would be spreading himself so thin that he might tear. He could win it all… or break even… or lose it all. Stand there, stricken, and bravely tell his more stricken clients, "Well, I did my best…"

If in fact that was true.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The lobby of the Harris County Courthouse, and even the halls outside the courtrooms, seemed to be under a hush, as if Scoot Shepard's death had momentarily checked the bustle and clamor of apparent justice. But inside the courtrooms, where the flags of Texas had been placed at half-mast, the process moved along.

Warren called Rick Levine's office and found out that Rick was conducting a pretrial examination of a cop who had made the collar in a drug case. Several defendants were lumped together in the indictment and Rick was working with Edith Broyer, one of the lawyers with whom he shared his suite of offices.

In the courtroom, when the judge declared a recess, Warren grabbed Rick by the sleeve of his jacket. "Got a minute?"

They walked outside to the stairwell, where drywall brushed off white on both their suits. The floor was rotting and there were open pipes on the ceiling. All over the courthouse, doors banged and echoed.

"Poor Scoot," Rick said. "He bought the farm a little before his time, didn't he? But he was asking for it, the dumb fuck. Where does that leave you with
Boudreau?"

Warren related his discussions with Johnnie Faye and Dwight Bingham. "If she says yes, what I need is a good lawyer to sit second chair. Not just a good lawyer — a
very
good lawyer. Will you do it with me?"

Doors continued to bang. Somewhere, far off, a woman was crying. Rick stroked his mustache thoughtfully. "I'm doing enough charity work now. Is there any money in it? I need to support my racehorses."

"Whatever I get I'll split with you."

"That may not even pay for oats. What's the plea?"

"Self-defense. Clyde Ott threatened to kill her — there are people who heard him say it. And before she blew him away, he picked up a poker from the fireplace."

"Did she provoke him? If she did, she can't claim self-defense."

"She claims she didn't," Warren said. "There are no witnesses to contradict her."

"I have a lot on my plate in July." Rick frowned, scratched his head. "I'd have to get Edith to fill in for me on this drug case. I'd have to trade her
x
for
y
and a player to be named later."

Warren waited, said nothing.

"Fuck, sure I'll do it," Rick said, banging him on the shoulder. "It's a good case. Plenty of TV coverage. Let me do the cross on a couple of the witnesses. The cops — I'm terrific with the cops."

"You're going to love our client," Warren said. "If she becomes our client."

===OO=OOO=OO===

Warren and Johnnie Faye Boudreau sat at a small round table near the horseshoe bar in Ecstasy. Frank Sawyer leaned against the bar, drinking a 7-Up, scanning the Friday-night crowd. Young women were moving among the customers as waitresses and couch dancers. They wore high heels and thongs and yellow ribbons in their hair, and a few pairs of their bared breasts might have won contests. The dancers straddled some of the men, writhing to the disco beat without actually touching them, expecting a tenor twenty-dollar bill to be slipped into their thong as reward. The music was relentless and cigarette smoke swirled in the beams of the overhead spotlights. Warren's eyes itched.

He inclined his head toward one of the dancers, who looked no more than eighteen. "Where do you get them?"

Johnnie Faye seemed to have recovered from last night's trauma; her laugh was merry. "From all over Texas. Smalltown gals, usually run away from a mean daddy. Got a couple from England too, one from Sweden. You interested? Take your mind off your trouble at home?"

"It wouldn't quite do that," Warren said. "Well, are we in business or not? If we are, I have to go back and Xerox a copy of the file for Rick Levine."

"I asked around about you since yesterday. You've got a lot of people who think an awful lot of you. Maybe you didn't know that. That's all well and good, but what I need from a lawyer is to hear that I can't lose."

Warren said, "Any lawyer who tells you that you can't lose is a fool."

"Mr. Shepard said it."

"I don't believe that. You may have misunderstood him. It's a very good case. It's winnable. Not quite what they call a whale in a barrel, but close."

"Do better than that, counselor." Both Johnnie Faye's blue-gray eye and her hazel eye had clouded. He understood: they all wanted absolute commitment, certainty. It didn't exist anywhere else in the world — then why between client and lawyer in a major criminal case? Because nowhere else was your life so nakedly on the line.

"Trials aren't simple," he said. "Some witnesses lie. Some truthful witnesses appear to the jury to be lying. Some lying witnesses appear to be telling the truth. Other witnesses forget. Others become confused. Some jurors fall asleep or don't listen. Lawyers can make mistakes. So can judges. The jury's always right, whether it is or not. Bearing that in mind, we'll represent you as well or better than anyone else in town."