Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (2 page)

Warren, throughout the proceedings, had been outwardly grave but his head was not bowed. He felt as many criminals feel: more furious for having been caught — through
simple-mindedness and childlike trust — than sorry for having broken a social contract.

To grovel now would compound the crime against his self-respect. He squared his shoulders and said, "I relaxed my ethical standards, your honor. Even if a lawyer's client is a lowlife dog who sold cocaine to children, we're supposed to do all we can to help him. I went too far. And I bought a sob story. I'm ashamed not only because I perjured myself as an officer of the court but because it was an extreme error of personal judgment — more than this court will ever know."

"You finished, counselor? That's it?"

"Yes, your honor. And it's a lot."

Scowling, Judge Parker honored the deal that Warren had made with the Office of the District Attorney. But she added on her own that he be suspended for one year from practicing law, and during that year keep his bloodied nose out of the Harris County Courthouse.

Despite Warren's dark mutterings of protest, his wife was in the courtroom when Lou Parker sentenced him to the year's exile. At home later, in their bedroom, Charm kicked off her shoes and said heatedly, "From what I hear — and my sources are pretty good — if every lawyer who signed a false affidavit got suspended for a year, and if every prosecutor who withheld evidence because it might damage his case got caught, they could turn the Harris County Courthouse into a goddam parking lot! And that self-righteous bitch of a judge is well aware of it."

Warren said, "Honey, I knew what I was doing. I paid the price."

"Too facile. I think maybe the reason you helped Freer was a little deeper than you realize."

Deeper? He had wanted to save a handful of human lives. He asked what she meant.

She said, "I guess all lawyers sometimes think, 'There but for the grace of God…' What I'm trying to say is, Warren, you were weak. You think it was an error of judgment, but you should never have been making a judgment in the first place. A lawyer has no right to ever set himself up as a judge or jury. You did it because you don't like the system. You find it painful that people go to prison."

"Not all of them," he grumbled. "Ship most of the bastards where they can't harm us anymore. Maybe a space station on the way to Mars, an extraterrestrial Australia." He realized that he was evading her point.

So did Charm. "I'm not talking about the evil ones," she said. "Most of your clients are just common sleazeballs. Nine times out of ten they did something either horribly wrong or unforgivably stupid. The law says if they're guilty they have to go to jail for a certain number of years. You have to work within that law. If you don't like doing that, if you feel too sorry for them, maybe you weren't really cut out to be a criminal lawyer."

Warren had wanted to be lawyer not because his father had been a lawyer but because he believed he could be a better one. Even in law school he had understood that he didn't want to spend his life writing business contracts or becoming advisory partner to the battles of greedy men, although that way he might become rich. He wanted the challenge of litigative action. He knew that you couldn't thwart hurricanes or fight God's unfathomable will, but he believed that the law was meant to redress the imbalance wrought by human brute force, conniving, and wrongdoing. He had chosen criminal law.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered to his wife. "Lay off, will you? I feel like shit already. I don't need to be told I should quit practicing my profession."

"I didn't say that," she pointed out. But she backed off and let the matter drop.

During the twelve months of official disgrace he reported once a month to his probation officer. Damned if I'll vegetate, Warren decided. I'll use the time to do things I always said I wanted to do. He worked as an occasional part-time investigator for another lawyer, an old friend named Rick Levine. He joined a gym and pumped iron. He took a cordon bleu cooking class.

His office on Montrose was a single-story wood-frame white building, a converted residential cottage. Warren had started his career with a gang of young lawyers sharing a suite in a modern downtown building, but the sterility of the building outweighed the camaraderie. When he found the cottage, about a year before the Virgil Freer case, he moved in immediately. In that office, feet up on his desk, during the year of probation he read
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
most of Dostoyevski, some Faulkner, and books by Marilyn French and Betty Friedan in an effort to grasp how the world was changing. He studied
The Joy of Cooking
and Julia Child and made notes on a legal pad. In the summer he drove down to Mexico for a month and took a course in intensive Spanish at a little school called Interidiomas in the mountain town of San Miguel de Allende.

Charm stole a week's vacation from reporting and flew down to join him. They stayed in a little inn on a narrow cobbled street where purple bougainvillea climbed over the balcony, with a view of a cathedral that some visionary eighteenth-century Indio architect had designed from postcards of Chartres. The town smelled of flowers and donkey shit. In the cool rainy afternoons they made love while cathedral bells clanged, mongrels barked. Warren remembered it as the best week of his marriage, even better than their honeymoon on Maui. Charm said, "You're a good man. When this is all over, honey, you'll be fine."

Banishment ended, he appeared at the courthouse to inform the world that he was again ready to practice law. Except for the judges and prosecutors, everyone was friendly, backslapping. But it was referrals he needed: clients, not lunch companions. An occasional misdemeanor or minor drug case came his way, but most of the time he sat in his office annotating his cookbooks and reading current volumes of the
American Criminal Law Review.

Charm organized dinner parties for lawyers and their wives and husbands. Warren prepared escargots and coq au vin. The dinners were lively. Rick Levine — short, black-haired, with a flaring mustache, sloping nose, and the beginnings of a paunch — gravely said, "Maybe you should open up a restaurant."

"If you didn't expect to fatten up on the cuff, I might just do it."

Warren and Rick had been schoolmates together at Lamarr High, then at UT-Austin, class of '77, then at South Texas College of Law in Houston. Rick had become a defense attorney specializing in drug cases, figuring his fees by the kilo: $500 for marijuana, $5,000 for cocaine. He owned four racehorses stabled nearby in Louisiana. Two were named after his young children. Another was called Acapulco Gold, another White Lady.

One night after dinner Warren drew Rick outside to the terrace. "So I made a mistake once, but I'm still a damned good lawyer. Don't people remember that?"

"I imagine," Rick said, "that prospective clients may think that some of the judges are a little prejudiced against you. And that might be true. Everyone wants an edge, not a liability. I know it's bullshit, but that's how people are."

Warren realized that Rick had heard something. Maybe he
would
be a liability to a client. The thought shocked him a little.

Maybe I'm not tough enough: that, he realized, was what Charm had been trying to say. It could be that in this business you needed skin of leather and no heart. He remembered a Houston Oilers defensive tackle he had defended in a cocaine possession case some years ago. The football player said, "There's these rookies, see, at training camp? They show up on the field at seven in the morning to run laps and they work out until seven in the evening. Me, I show up at ten, leave at three. And they get cut, and I stay. They can't ever figure it out. See what I'm saying? They don't have it — whatever
it
is — and I do."

Warren came to question whether he had it, whatever it was. But he also remembered William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech, where the old writer had said that our task was not merely to survive, but to prevail.

I'll prevail, Warren vowed. And to prove to his peers and betters that one lapse in judgment had diminished neither his skills nor his respect for the law, he began hustling court appointments.

Houston, alone among major cities, employed no public defender's office. If an accused claimed he was too poor to hire counsel, the judge would appoint a lawyer and order a legal fee paid out of public funds. Each morning at eight o'clock, hungry defense attorneys left their business cards on the bench at the judge's elbow, then crowded around the desks of the court coordinators who helped dispense the cases. Some lawyers, fresh out of law school, officed out of the courthouse basement cafeteria where the overhead was the price of an overcooked hamburger and a cup of weak coffee; they sought court-appointed work in order to gain experience. Older lawyers hustled for it when their collars were frayed and they smelled of stale tobacco.

When he was younger, more brash, Warren likened the older lawyers to vultures waiting for dead meat. Now he was more forgiving. He was one of them.

He did court-appointed work for two years. It was survival. He never went to trial: all the cases were plea-bargained. Warren once overheard a journeyman lawyer tell a judge, "You can pay me $300 and I'll plead this guy guilty and move it through real smooth, or you can get some other guy for $150 who'll fuck up your docket. Up to you, your honor." Warren spent his days haggling like a merchant in a North African bazaar. He dealt with drunken drivers, vagrants, addicts and small-time crack dealers, the trash of the streets and ghettos. The court dockets were jammed — sentences were handed down swiftly, often by rote. Most of the judges' stone-faced speeches were generated by computers. The prosecutors were impatient, ambitious. The price of mercy was time. And no one had time.

Some days Warren wanted to smash his fists against the courtroom walls in frustration. I'm a trial lawyer, he thought bitterly, that's where I shine, that's what I love. For the sake of a son of a bitch like Virgil Freer I gave all that up. He grew depressed, moody. His face began to lose its youthful sparkle.

But still in his daydreams, like a lover whose indifferent mistress is far away, he embraced the shadowy belief that if he kept working at it and did his best, he could somehow claw his way back to where he had been before he lied to save his client who was now doing thirty years at Huntsville prison for armed robbery and attempted murder of a police officer, and whose scruffy, scrapping, shallow-eyed children, for whom Warren had felt such pity, were thrown away on the common garbage heap of life. If I live long enough, he thought with a renewed burst of outrage and shame, one day I'll be plea-bargaining for them too.

Rain beat on the roof, lightning crackled across the
horizon. Behind each stroke the lightning left a wake of heated air that came to them as thunder. Charm Blackburn cried out softly and it woke Warren, who calmed her with whispers and touches until she subsided into uneasy sleep. The digital clock showed 3:30 A.M.: Friday, May 19, 1989. For a while Warren listened to the rain and the banshee wind.

The lawn sprinklers popped up at six o'clock, arcing their spray onto the soaked grass. Warren woke again, this time with an erection, which he attributed to his wife's presence on his side of the bed. Usually Charm hugged her down pillow and kept far to her own side, for the bony parts of Warren's body disturbed her sleep. But this morning she was behind him, breasts pressed against his shoulder blades, breath in his ear. He took that closeness to be a hangover from the storm and the unnamed fears it arouses in those of us whose roots are not strong.

Twisting toward her, he whispered her name. Charm opened her eyes to slits, but slid a hand from under the sheet to wag her finger briefly in front of Warren's nose. The wave was the same one she had learned to use down in San Miguel de Allende to fend off urchins who nagged for pesos. The kids backed off. Then Charm would say, "Oh, God, how could I have done that?" and chase after them to press coins in their hands.

"What time is it?" she whispered.

"Six-fifteen."

She turned away from him and pulled the comforter over her head.

The clouds rushed westward, birds chirped on the lawn. Sliding out of bed, Warren embraced Oobie, his arthritic old golden retriever who slept on the carpet at the foot of the bed, and then slipped into his gray sweats. With Oobie joyfully limping and panting at his side he jogged for twenty minutes along Braes Bayou. At home again he showered, brewed coffee, and with it ate a bowl of Mueslix and a banana from the tree by the pool.

He dressed quietly, careful not to wake Charm. Looking down at what he could see of his wife — some strands of dark blond hair, a curve of ivory cheek, a familiar shape in a fetal curl under the covers — he whispered, "I love you."

A few minutes after seven he was in his BMW on the Southwest Freeway under a blue sky scrubbed by the night's rain. Under it you could dream of wranglers riding up from the Brazos and the old paddleboats churning foam on Buffalo Bayou. And indeed, Warren dreamed as he drove. But he dreamed that he was married to a woman who still adored him, that his office telephone never stopped ringing, that he was in control of his life. The wholeness of things held sway. He knew that he had to make a move or the center would fall apart.

===OO=OOO=OO===

From a telephone outside the basement cafeteria in the courthouse, he called his answering service. The only message of consequence was a request to call Scoot Shepard's office. Dropping another quarter into the slot, Warren returned the call. A secretary informed him that Mr. Shepard was in a pretrial hearing in the 342nd District Court.

"And what's happening in the 342nd?" Warren asked.

"A setting of bail in the Ott case," the secretary said.

"If I can't catch him there," Warren promised, "I'll call back."

Scoot Shepard was the dean of Houston criminal defense attorneys; he had been a friend of Warren's father. Few people are legends in their own time, but Scoot was one. In the trial of John R. Baker, the oil multimillionaire accused of poisoning his society wife, Scoot had hung the jury twice in a row until the case ultimately was dismissed. He had represented Martha Sachs, the sex doctor accused of murdering her woman lover in front of two witnesses, and won an acquittal. Scoot had defended major drug dealers and Mafia capos and got them off when there was little more than a hazy hope or a muttered Sicilian prayer. He had been profiled in
Time
and even
Vanity Fair,
and had been asked by a dozen New York publishers to write a book about his cases. Declining, he was quoted as saying, "Once I give away my secret, what advantage have I got?" But there was minimal honesty in that, Warren decided. Nobody could learn from a book what Scoot knew.