Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (45 page)

"Are you moving back in with your wife?"

"That is exactly what I am
not
doing. Give me a break, Maria. Give me a merit badge for honesty. Maybe honesty is stupid in this kind of situation, but I like to think not. I'll call you, I'll let you know what's happening. And I promise you, for whatever it's worth, I won't play games. If I ever come back here, I'll be a free man." He paused at the door, turning. "You know something? You saved my sanity. You're a loyal friend."

"I'm good at that," she said. "See you around, counselor."

He went out the front door to his car, got in, and shut his eyes for a long minute. He had not meant to sweep her out of his life with a single blow like that of a leopard's paw. Yet it seemed that had happened. He felt stunned, pained — a little corrupt. He drove back to Ravendale.

He found Hector watching television and drinking a beer. Warren mixed a strong vodka tonic and sat down with him. They talked about life in Mexico and life in the United States and they kept drinking. "Are you going back to El Palmito?" Warren asked.

Hector said, "I miss my wife and children, but if I go back there I'll always be poor. I don't want to be poor." He shrugged. "Who knows?" He had told Warren the Mexicans had an answer to many difficult questions. That answer was "Maybe yes, maybe no. But most probably … who knows?"

After a while there was little to talk about except the case, and Warren was tired of that. It was always that way with clients after trial: you had been bound together like shipmates on a storm-ravaged raft, and then with rescue — or drowning — it was over. A lawyer learned to live with loss even if he won. He had saved Hector's life but they had little else in common.

On Monday, when Hector had made up his mind, Warren put him on a bus for McAllen, on the border, with enough money in his pocket for a bus from McAllen to San Luis Potosi, and from there to El Palmito, and something more to tide him over until he found work. Hector thanked him quietly. "You will come visit me one day?"

"Maybe," Warren said. "Who knows?"

Hector smiled at that.

"Don't come back," he said to Hector at the bus station. "Poor is not good, but I don't think this is better."

During the early part of the week he signed on three new clients: a cocaine-smuggling case, an alleged rape of a sixteen-year-old girl by the son of a prominent department store owner, and a court-appointed capital murder that another judge asked him to handle. Still working for sleazeballs, he thought. But you never knew when another Hector Quintana might come along, and you had to be ready.

On Thursday he received a referral from a lawyer hospitalized with a kidney stone; the defendant, the owner of a restaurant supply company, had been indicted for felonious assault. Warren read the file. The client, now out on bail, was accused of battering his wife and stabbing her six times in the arm and breasts with a toenail scissors. He arrived in Warren's office.

"What's your version of the events?" Warren asked the client.

"Shit, I was drunk, hardly knew what I was doing. But I want to tell you something — she deserved it."

"And I want to tell you something too—" Warren tossed the file across the desk. "I hope they put you away for twenty fucking years. Get another lawyer."

There are limits, he thought. For me, anyway.

The rape case fell into Dwight Bingham's court, which made Warren a little uneasy: he would see Maria Hahn every day. Well, he would deal with it. He was a civilized man. Nothing works out quite the way it's planned. He was beginning to grasp the human equation: to be intelligently alive means to cherish what you've got, fight for what you want, spurn what you don't want, and forget about what you can't have.

On Friday morning he called Charm at the station and said, "What are you doing tomorrow night? Would you like to have dinner?"

They went to an Italian restaurant, where they ate saltimbocca and drank a bottle of chianti. He took her back to Ravendale to show her where he had been living, and they were both nervous but nevertheless they went to bed. Warren was surprised that it was both so familiar and so exciting. At first she was shy, but the shyness left. In the night she clung to him.

On Sunday she invited him to the house. He stripped to the waist and mowed the lawn while Oobie ran in circles on the grass, fetching a dead tennis ball that Charm threw. Charm cooked blueberry pancakes and made a pitcher of Bloody Marys. In bed again, after brunch, she said, "There's something I haven't told you."

"And what might that be?"

"Bluestein, that agent I hired? He got me the job in Boston. I said yes."

"Well, that's good, Charm," Warren said easily, although he knew he had cause to be irked. "That's what you want. When did that happen?"

"Last week."

"And when do you start?"

"Right after Labor Day. Only—"

"Yes?"

"—I don't know how you feel about it."

"I feel," he said, "that it's dead right for you. If you mean do I feel like starting a law practice in Boston, or commuting to Boston for the occasional weekend in order to sustain a marriage, the answer is no."

"Are you angry?"

"No. Things will work out. You'll see." He was relieved. He was surprised by the feeling and kept it to himself.

===OO=OOO=OO===

On Monday morning, when he stopped by Bob Altschuler's office to discuss the rape case and hear the state's inevitable offer of a deal, Altschuler shut the door, grinned and said, "Before we get to that, I have news for you. Off the record?"

"Naturally."

"I read
Quintana.
You did a great job. We picked up a guy named Frank Sawyer last week at Ecstasy — positive I.D. by the two witnesses that he was the one burned this bum Jerry Mahoney. Couldn't find any weapon, but Thiel and Douglas sweated him. Douglas is particularly good at that. So finally Sawyer's lawyer says, 'What kind of a deal can we cut?' To make a long story short, we cut the deal and Sawyer says: 'This woman made me do it, see? She's my drug connection, and she knew some things about me that she threatened to tell to the law if I didn't play ball. I had no choice, see? She sends me down to the mission to find some guy in a green sweater and gray suit, some guy that might have I.D.'d her when she offed a fucking slope. So I did it. I didn't want to, but I had to. I threw the gun away in Buffalo Bayou, but I can show y'all where. And it's her gun.'"

Altschuler rubbed his big hands together vigorously. "So we got the underwater boys to dredge the bayou and they found the gun. An ivory-handled Colt .45. And it's hers, registered and all. Like she said under oath: 'It's in my desk, and I'm the only one who has a key.' Which means we have the necessary corroborating evidence to back up the accomplice-witness. We arrested her on Saturday night, right at the club. Boy, she screamed like a hog with a hornet up its ass, she cursed me like I was Satan come up from the pit. You would have loved it, Warren."

"I love it now, Bob. What kind of a deal did you make with Sawyer?"

"Thirty-five years. He's out in twelve, the little prick."

"You like the case?" Warren asked.

"I like the case," Altschuler said warmly. "You did the right thing."

"Close," Warren said, "but I haven't lost any sleep over it. And I would have done it anyway," he added, without even a hint of doubt. "Now tell me what lucky lawyer gets to defend my former client."

"Myron Moore." The prosecutor boomed a wicked laugh. "Doctor Doom! I don't know what idiot recommended him, but she went for it. I'm meeting Myron in half an hour. He wants to cut a deal too, but he can kiss my rosy-red bunions. If I can tie this one into Trunh, and I think I can, that's multiple murder — it becomes a capital. Whichever way, believe me, I'll take this case to a jury and if she doesn't get the needle, the cunt will do life without parole."

Altschuler extended his hand. Warren shook it, a little uneasily, and was at least pleased that this time he could extricate himself before his hand turned blue. But the sudden camaraderie bothered him. In six months, he knew, when Altschuler became a judge, he would have a friend on the bench. And to hell with that, he thought. I didn't need that before and I don't need it now.

He looked at the calendar on the prosecutor's desk. It was August 14, 1989. The date jogged his memory. "Bob," he said, "do me a favor?"

"Anything," Altschuler said.

"Ask Myron to give his new client a message from me."

"Sure," Altschuler said, puzzled, "but you'd better be careful. What's the message?"

"Just tell her 'Happy Birthday.'"

"Is it really? Delighted! Boy, I really had you figured wrong. You are some nasty bastard."

"No," Warren said, "not like you. But I have my moments."

When he finished their business on the rape case he hurried through the heat to the courthouse, reaching the fifth floor and the domain of the 342nd District Court a few minutes after noon. In the cool well of the empty courtroom Maria Hahn still sat at the court reporter's table, back turned to the door. She was alone in the room, gathering up papers, and Warren sensed she was about to rise from her chair and leave. Moving catlike with some speed, he bent behind her chair, put his cheek next to hers above the pulse of the white neck, took a quick breath to try and smother the aberrant beat of his heart, and said, "I have a riddle for you."

She didn't turn her head. Quietly she reminded him, "You said no games. And you made me a promise."

"I'm well aware of that," Warren said. "Here's the riddle. What is a criminal lawyer?"

"I know that one.
Redundant.
I've got a better one: why are they starting to use lawyers in laboratory experiments instead of white rats?"

"Tell me the answer this evening at dinner… if you're free. And I'll tell you everything that's happened to me.

Maria raised an eyebrow. "Everything?"

"Yes."

Late that night, after he had unburdened, he said, "So what's the answer?"

Maria softly sighed. Leading him to her bedroom, bending close as if offering a rare confidence, she said, "Because there are more lawyers than white rats. Lawyers clean up their messes faster than white rats do. If you have any sense, you don't get personally attached to lawyers. But mostly," she added, with a smile he would treasure, "because there are some things that white rats just won't do."

In Houston: especially to criminal defense attorneys Kent Schaffer and David Bires; and to Robert Turner, Deborah Gottlieb, and Edward Mallett of the same fraternity; and to Mike McSpadden, Tom Routt, and Norman Lanford, district court judges of Harris County, all of whom, for the purpose of this book, gave me access to their minds and the peculiar workings of the law. In Los Angeles: to Bob Lewin and Frank Cooper for their wise counsel. In Mexico: to my wife, Maureen Earl, for her good company and perceptions. In New York: to Jim Silberman for his calm guidance. And everywhere to Maurice Nessen for his passionate editing and attention to legal detail.

None are responsible for the ideas in this book, but all contributed, knowingly or not.

C.I.

San Miguel de Allende June 1990

Clifford Irving was born in New York, educated at Cornell University and in Europe, and now lives in the mountains of Mexico with his wife, writer Maureen Earl. Together they have five children scattered over four continents.

Mr. Irving is currently at work on a novel about the death penalty.