Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (4 page)

He felt a terrible pain. He went down backward on the seat, spurting bright blood on the dashboard.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The name of the smiling wino propped against the optician's shop in the mini-mall was James Thurgood Dandy — known back in his native Beeville, Texas, of course, as Jim Dandy. As the station wagon and then the second car pulled into the parking lot, Jim Dandy had clambered to his feet, yawned a couple of times, then felt an uncomfortable pressure in his groin which told him that his bladder was full. He turned against the side of the building and urinated. When he reached to zip up his fly, he heard a woman's scream followed by a sharp crack that could only be a gunshot.

Instinctively he ducked, cowering against the building, his fly still gaping. He turned his head toward the street. "Kitty Marie," he whimpered, "don't kill me. Whatever I done I didn't mean to. Please, Kitty Marie!"

But Kitty Marie was far away in Beeville, and no one killed Jim Dandy.

Finally he zipped up his fly and walked slowly over to the station wagon. The front window was wide open. He peered inside. Someone in that car looked awfully dead.

On the seat, the man's outstretched right hand clutched an open leather wallet. A laundry ticket protruded from it and a fat sheaf of wrinkled green was exposed in the billfold part. Jim Dandy reached into the car and took the wallet from the clawed hand. "Hot damn," he whispered.

He heard a sound, a gasp. From where, from whom, he didn't know. It might have come from the man he thought was dead. Clutching the wallet, he turned and ran.

===OO=OOO=OO===

An hour later, Hector Quintana, a homeless man, rolled his Safeway shopping cart down a concrete walkway, past the tennis courts and then between Buildings C and D of the Ravendale Apartments in the Braeswood district.

The Ravendale Apartments rented furnished apartments on a month-to-month basis to visiting yuppies and divorcees, who stayed until they went back home or found permanent living space elsewhere in Houston. The residents of Ravendale drank Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and played volleyball in the pool on hot summer evenings. No one paid attention to strangers. They were nearly all strangers to each other.

Good Dumpsters here, Hector Quintana had learned. Gringos threw things out which back in El Palmito his people would battle to own. He once found a toaster oven; another time, New Balance running shoes with a hole in the toe. Fit him perfectly, aided by balled-up wads of newspaper. Peanut butter, a box of Wheat Thins, an unopened bottle of Mr. and Mrs. T's Bloody Mary Mix. He would never understand gringos.

Tonight he had even better luck. Rummaging in the Dumpster among the various garbage smells, he dug out a pair of dirty white tennis socks, a half-finished jar of Planters salted peanuts, and then a bottle of Old Crow about four inches full. He opened it, sniffing to make sure it was not kerosene. The aroma of bourbon filled his nostrils.

Pushing his luck, Hector dug farther. Amid lemon peels and coffee grounds, his brown hand closed on something cool and metallic: a pistol.

He looked at it and knew he had a prized possession, something which could change his life — if he could find the courage to use it correctly.

But where would that courage come from? To work that out, he sat down on the fresh-mowed grass next to the parking lot and ate the jar of peanuts, which he washed down with big swallows of Old Crow until the bottle was empty.

Before he parted from his wife and young children in his village of El Palmito, his father had taken him into the fields and said,
"Hijo mio,
when you get where you're going, don't forget Francisca and your children. Send money to them before you get drunk on Saturday night. And also don't forget, the reason opportunity is often missed is that it usually comes disguised as hard work. Go with God."

Suddenly Hector Quintana thought he understood what the old man had meant. Abandoning the shopping cart, he stuffed the little pistol into his back pocket.

He set out on foot in the warm May night, heading for the Circle K convenience store he had seen just up the block on Bissonet.

On the humid Monday morning following the reduction
of bail for Johnnie Faye Boudreau, Warren Blackburn returned for the first time in two years to the 299th District Court, the scene of his crime. The sweat on his forehead slowly cooling, he stood for ten minutes in the anteroom of Judge Lou Parker's chambers. He had avoided her court assiduously until now, but now it was time. Can't duck her forever, he decided, and I've paid my dues.

Warren wore his best dark blue suit and his shoes had been shined by the bootblack in the courthouse basement. He watched Melissa Bourne-Smith, the new court coordinator of the 299th, bent over the computer at her government-issue metal desk. He had been introduced to her a few weeks ago in the cafeteria, and since then they had exchanged a few hellos in the elevators. He tried today to exude a mix of gravity and bonhomie, but he felt neither. In this court he felt like a burned-out failure of a lawyer.

Finally the court coordinator raised her Afro and shot him a radiantly false smile.

"Might have something good for you. The judge said she wants a young lawyer on this one." She glanced down at the docket sheet. "Defendant's name is Hector Quintana. An illegal alien. Capital murder, case number 388-6344. Can you come back at noon?"

Surprised, not quite believing what he had heard, Warren wrote quickly on his yellow legal pad.

Capital murder was top of the line, differing from ordinary murder in that there were aggravating circumstances: murder during the commission of another felony, murder of a police officer. A few veteran lawyers specialized in court-appointed capitals, since the fees averaged a decent $750 for every day's appearance in court, even if it took only an hour's time to plea-bargain with whoever was the assistant district attorney on the case. But sometimes a judge gave an opportunity to a promising young lawyer. That Judge Lou Parker would do that for
him,
Warren thought, seemed unlikely.

"Who's the victim?" he asked Bourne-Smith.

"Some Vietnamese. Shot in the parking lot on Wesleyan. It's a nothing case, it'll go real fast. Just let me get the judge's okay."

"I'll be here at noon," Warren said. "Thank you."

Outside the 299th a chain gang of eight prisoners emerged from one of the courthouse elevators. All wore thin brown cotton jumpsuits with the words HARRIS COUNTY JAIL stenciled on the back. All were young, all but two were black. To a man they looked as if hope and freedom were dead issues. They were led by a woman deputy sheriff in tight taupe uniform, who said politely, "Gentlemen handcuffed by the right hand, place your hands over the chain like this. Now y'all follow me." The prisoners marched off in a file toward Judge Parker's holding cell. Warren wondered if Hector Quintana was among them.

Warren left the anteroom through the back door into the eighth-floor main hallway, then headed down the stairs to the fifth floor and the domain of Judge Bingham's 342nd District Court.

Three or four lawyers in ill-fitting suits and ties were lounging in Bingham's handsomely furnished jury box, guffawing and back-slapping at the latest courthouse gossip. They, like Warren, were waiting for the largess of the court coordinator.

"Morning, your honor. How's business?"

Judge Bingham glanced down from the bench, a shade startled. Then he said warmly, "Warren… you devil."

Warren sometimes wondered if Bingham confused him with his father, or if there was a natural assumption about a chip off the old block.

"How's the wife, son? Saw her on the TV a few evenings ago. Looking peachy."

"She's fine, Judge. And how's your garden?"

The widowed judge, mocha-colored and slightly pink-eyed, looked preoccupied. "Can I do anything for you?"

"Whatever's available, Judge. My wife likes to shop at Neiman's."

"With what I imagine your wife makes, she can afford it. But you go see LuAnne. Tell her to give you next up."

Warren went back toward chambers to talk to LuAnne, Bingham's veteran court coordinator. A sign on her desk said: OLD AGE AND TREACHERY WILL OVERCOME YOUTH AND SKILL. Obeying the judge's order, LuAnne gave Warren the file folder for an escape case. The defendant, J. J. Gillis, had been under arrest for a DWI on the western edge of Harris County. When no one was looking he walked unmolested out of the local jail. He was picked up fifteen minutes later in a bar down the street.

Warren talked to Gillis, a black workingman of about forty with gnarled hands, one of them now shackled to a steel bolt on the bench outside Bingham's holding cell. Then he sought out Bob Altschuler, whose job required him to plea-bargain for escapes and DWIs as well as prosecute headline murders. Altschuler was talking quietly to the tall, curly-haired court reporter Maria Hahn. She stepped to one side when Warren nodded.

"The Gillis case, Bob. Man was still drunk when he walked out of the jail. You can't call that an escape. What kind of an offer will you make?"

Altschuler said sourly, "Intoxication doesn't negate the crime. A deuce," he said, meaning two years in TDC, the Texas Department of Corrections, in the Huntsville prison complex.

"I can do better in trial," Warren said.

Altschuler raised a bushy eyebrow. "Maybe you can, but if you keep Bingham from a few afternoons tending his zinnias, you'll never get appointed in this court again except to sweep it."

Warren said, "How about thirty days jail time and five years probation?"

"No way. Six months and ten years."

Warren took the prosecutor's elbow and steered him firmly to the judge's bench, where he began to explain where they stood with Gillis.

The judge interrupted him. "Let's cut the baloney, I want to quit by two o'clock today. How about sixty days jail time and five years probated?"

Altschuler frowned. He hated to lose, even in something as minor as a DWI.

Elated, Warren went back to his client. He produced papers to sign: a waiver of indictment and of other constitutional rights. Gillis scrawled his name and then, without a word, turned his head away.

It was 9:35. At the court coordinator's desk, Warren filled in a voucher for his $150 fee. What he had done would make no headlines. He could do it ten times a week, if he was lucky enough to get that many appointments, and it would never make him rich. But he had helped a man — there was something to be said for that. He wished Gillis had thanked him.

Any sense of accomplishment vanished an hour later. He had a sentencing in another court, this time by a judge who had hitherto been a dedicated prosecutor. Warren's current client, with two prior misdemeanors for possession of marijuana, had been indicted for molesting a minor. He was black, nineteen, a high-school dropout who could barely read or write more than his own name.

Warren had entered a plea of nolo contendere. Now he made his closing speech. "Your honor, this youngster with an eighth grade education is mentally incompetent. We can't unscramble the egg. Of what benefit to society is incarceration? He has a family that's willing to take care of him and get him a simple job. I submit that to place him in confinement is neither just nor compassionate, and it isn't productive for the community."

The judge gave the boy eight years.

One for every year of his schooling, Warren realized. He left the courtroom feeling whipped. These were his days: win some, lose some — a bit of triumph here, a bit of failure there. Troubled dreams, scattered lives he would never touch again. He dealt with young men who were bewildered, or vicious, or grossly ignorant, or beaten down by life. If you were a lawyer, man could be an unlovely species. There was no glory here.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Glory, with all its attendant penalties, had first come to Warren when he was twelve years old. The Blackburn family had lived on a street called Bellefontaine that dead-ended on the Shamrock Hilton Hotel, then the center of the city's social activity. In summer, together with other professional families, the Blackburns rented a lanai room around the huge hotel pool with its ten- and twenty-meter diving boards. What every boy wanted was to become brave and strong enough to dive off the twenty-meter board, but all were forbidden until they reached sixteen.

At the age of twelve, Warren said to his friends, "Watch this…" He climbed the metal ladder to stare down at the green surface, thinking that it hadn't looked nearly that high from poolside. His knees were trembling, but he launched himself out in a belly whopper, careened through the air, hit the water, and split his cheek so badly that it required five stitches.

Maximum Gene grounded him for two weeks.

After school Warren and Rick Levine would climb on their bikes and pedal down to the Shamrock for the conventions. At the funeral directors' convention Warren lay down in four different coffins. He begged one of the directors to embalm him: "Y' know, just to see what it'd be like…"

Air France stewardesses sunbathed topless at the Shamrock pool. The Frenchwomen liked those Texas boys who were not afraid to come up and say, "Hi, y'all,
comment allez-vous?"
There was a kind of glory there too, Warren found.

He was a curious mixture of sophistication and country ways. His paternal grandfather, a snuff-dipping shoe store owner, had always rolled his own cigarettes from bags of Duke's Mixture. When the weekend came, Maximum Gene himself drove about town in a Ford pickup that dangled furry dice from the rearview mirror. The judge's favorite home-cooked meal was deep-fried turtle and buttermilk biscuits. All women were called gals. He was cordial to black lawyers but at home he referred to the man who mowed the lawn as a nigger. Warren winced. Still, like his father, he chewed toothpicks after lunch, whistled through his teeth when he called the dog, got out of bed before daylight, said "ma'am" to any woman over thirty he didn't know, and when he went out to a picnic in the hill country he pulled on his oldest cowhide boots, rolled up his sleeves and jammed a gimme cap over his black hair.