Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (5 page)

But as a prelaw student at UT he had taken elective courses in music and philosophy, he could quote Shakespeare and Emerson, and he played Verdi on his tape deck more often than Merle Haggard. Backpacking around Europe the summer after college graduation, he stood in line for the opera at Covent Garden and in Paris had an affair with a young Dutch painter who guided him through the Louvre until his feet ached. Back in Houston for law school, he bought a subscription to the Alley Theater, and in 1980, in his first year of law practice, took on two pro bono cases for the NAACP and the Animal Rights League.

He met Charmian Ellen Kimball by the side of the Shamrock Hilton pool one September Sunday afternoon in his twenty-sixth year. He was wearing aviator glasses and cutoff Levi's, and five minutes later he struck a match with his thumbnail. Charm had just been graduated from the University of Pennsylvania as a journalism major — a willowy, blond young woman with serious blue eyes and a strong, clear voice. Her stepfather, a Boston stockbroker, had brought the family to Houston when a branch of his firm opened in the Galeria mall. She fought for the right to go back East to college, and then to spend her junior year in Paris. No idea was more foreign to her than that of marrying a Texan.

Warren took her to dinner that evening at a good French restaurant and announced, "Not bad. But if God hadn't meant us to eat grits with every meal, then why'd He give us red-eye gravy?"

"For God's sake," Charm cried, "how can you be a lawyer and a redneck?"

"Hey, I drove a Harley at UT, and I know where Johnnie Cash served time — but so does my father and he's a judge."

There was a solidity about Warren, a usefulness. He could make Charm Kimball laugh, and he touched a yearning spot deep inside her. She came from a broken marriage, whereas Warren's parents had been married for thirty-five years. He lived in a bachelor studio apartment on the edge of Hermann Park; it was there, a few weeks after they met, that he and Charm became lovers. She was in her first season as a television reporter. "It may seem glamorous," she explained one December evening, curled against him in his bed, "but a few days ago I interviewed a woman who poured gasoline on her two kids and lit a match…" Charm shook her head furiously to clear the image. "You have to look so goddam serious while you're chirping away into the microphone like a dingbat. There's no time to know what people really
feel."

"You care," Warren said forcefully. "And when I see you on the tube, it shows."

"Am I good, or is it surface bullshit?"

"You're good. You're so personal."

He hugged her while she cried a little, for she realized that, for Warren, to love meant to help and appreciate. She felt a weight to his love that she could lean on. By then Warren's two sisters had settled with their husbands and babies in Southern California, Maximum Gene was dead from a heart attack, and Warren's mother had remarried and moved to Dallas. He took Charm with him on a skiing holiday to Aspen. He had a visceral need for a mate, and they were married a year after they had met: married at the Shamrock.

Throughout the summer before their wedding they debated about where to live. "I miss the East," Charm said wistfully, meaning concerned Bostonians, abrasive New Yorkers, wit that didn't depend on country metaphor. Houston was friendly, laid-back, dumb. Warren shrugged and said, "Maybe. But the first thing I notice when I land at JFK is the sour look on people's faces. That has to rub off on you."

They agreed to stay in Houston, where he was making a name for himself as a young criminal defense attorney, and they pooled their money for the house on Braes Bayou. He gave up his bachelor habit of leaving crusted dishes in the sink. He quit smoking because Charm didn't smoke and it worried her that he did. He cherished his young wife for her rummaging intelligence, her drive toward womanhood.

Charm graduated to co-anchor on the evening news. Warren chose their few investments and took care of the mortgage from a joint account. He picked up the tab for their skiing holidays, their occasional trips to New York and Europe, all their nights out in restaurants. But after Virgil Freer's confession and the year of suspension handed to him by Lou Parker, there was no more Europe, and he flinched at the rising prices of lift tickets on the slopes. He had to ask his wife for money. After his suspension was lifted he was going over the credit card statements one month, when he saw $1200 for Marshall Field and $1600 for Lord & Taylor. He asked her what it was for.

"I bought two new suits," Charm said.

"That's a hell of a lot for just a couple of suits. I haven't bought a suit in two years. And if I was feeling flush and went to Brooks Brothers, it might cost me five hundred."

He knew right away he'd blundered. Women's clothes were a subject that men rarely understood.

Charm's eyes grew hooded. "You can't afford a suit," she said, "and I can. I need good clothes for my job, which is what's supporting us these days. You really piss me off, Warren."

"You want to tell me why?"

"Because you've given up on your life. I don't think you even realize what's happening to you."

They were in the den, where the TV was hidden behind a built-in walnut cabinet. One wall was lined with books and the other featured Currier & Ives prints and photographs of both their families. Oobie lay on her mat, watching them carefully with wet eyes. Warren stood framed in the arched doorway, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans.

He hated these discussions. He wanted this part of his life to be harmonious, even if the rest of it year by year had degenerated. He slid his hands from his pockets and folded his arms across his chest, mirroring Charm.

"I don't want you to cook," Charm said. "I appreciate it when you do, but I think it's just a way of avoiding more important things. You're doing that court-appointed stuff all the time. You think it's demeaning but you still do it. You hate the people you have to deal with. You're not fighting hard enough, Warren. You're bright, probably a lot brighter than you want people to know. You've got a mind that cuts right to the heart of a problem. But you've let that drift away from you. You're only thirty-three, and you've lost your zest."

The truth of all this was so obvious that he became inwardly furious. But he tried to keep it in check.

"Zest for what?"

"For everything… including me. When you want to make love to me it's usually in the morning, but you know I'm only half-alive then and I'm a lousy lay. At night, when I'm in the mood, you're too tired. Somehow we manage to do it twice a week, never more, sometimes less. I get the feeling you mark it on a calendar and say to yourself, 'Well, the old lady's due for another bang, better give it to her so she doesn't get antsy and go elsewhere for it.' And I'll tell you something else. We used to have great sex. We don't anymore. It's by rote."

All this, except for his marking a calendar, was so on the money that he felt appalled. And maybe, mentally, he did mark a calendar.

Charm was not finished. "We used to talk about having children when I was thirty and my biological cuckoo clock began to act up. Let me tell you, it's chirping now — really loud."

"Are you saying you're ready to have a baby?"

"Don't you see I'm saying the opposite? Warren, I don't want children if our marriage is going down the drain. I love you, but your life's so screwed up you can't find the energy to love me back. I don't know if I want your kids. You're not doing the work you want to do. You're poor and you don't like being poor. You talk to your dog more than to anyone else. You're depressed, you're irritable, you snap at people. What kind of a father would you be? Get your act together.
Do
something about it."

No one had ever hurt him more deeply. He hadn't been able to reply. He walked out of the room into the kitchen and poured a glassful of whiskey, which he drank in five minutes. And then another.

Warren believed this about most women: they were not as logical as men but therefore wiser. They reached conclusions by a route that few men could take — intuitively, often dogmatically. Rarely could they explain that journey to a man, for there were few if any detours on the way to the conclusion, the kind of detours that men loved and that made them feel they had intelligently rejected all alternatives. Women could do this because by their biochemical nature they knew what they wanted. Not many men did — most appeared to live as if they did, but there was a stubborn ruinous denial of truth at the heart of the human male ego. The complexity of men's desires did not allow much honest communication. The forest was often impenetrable.

And so Warren did not reject his wife's accusations. He did not argue. He asked himself what he had done wrong. Had he been kidding himself all his life? It's possible, he thought grimly, that I wooed her too well, made her think I was of substance when I was nothing.

He went into joint therapy with Charm and at one weekly session realized aloud to the therapist, "If I was willing to work at learning to cook and at picking up Spanish down in Mexico, I should be willing to work at making a good marriage. It's the basic human challenge when you pass beyond maintenance."

Their sex life improved for a time. In the evenings, he seduced her. On some weekend mornings, when he came back from running with Oobie, Charm was propped against the pillows, face freshly washed, waiting for him.

But that did not last. The rest of his life, his life as a lawyer, continued to puzzle and defeat him.

There is a winding-down in an unhappy marriage, a struggle to define what's wrong, a reluctance to relinquish what's right — and a need, if need be, to bow the head and accept the probability that protestations of love, so glorified by and dear to the human imagination, may not be enough for sustenance.

Another year passed, and Hilton sold the Shamrock to the Texas Medical Center to turn into a ten-story parking lot. His marriage, Warren realized, seemed to have gone the same route: from elegance and passionate gaiety to the drab business of getting on with things.

A faded glory, he thought, like his love affair with the law.

But then, one Friday in May, he listened to Scoot Shepard plead for reduction of bail for Johnnie Faye Boudreau, and the following week a court coordinator he hardly knew asked him to defend a homeless man named Hector Quintana against a charge of capital murder.

===OO=OOO=OO===

He called Scoot Shepard's secretary, who told him that the lunch date was set for Thursday. "Mr. Shepard will be in trial in the 181st. If you could pick him up there around twelve-thirty, he'd appreciate it."

"I'll be there," Warren promised.

He would have time for a cup of coffee before his noon meeting with Judge Lou Parker. He maneuvered around a pack of waiting jurors into the elevator. When it stopped on the fourth floor, Rick Levine darted inside, his brown eyes shining with good humor. In the late nineteenth century Rick's great-grandfather had emigrated from Kiev on a ship bound for New York, but the immigration authorities at Ellis Island, overburdened with paperwork, rerouted the ship to Galveston Island in the Gulf of Mexico, thus helping to establish the first Jewish community in Texas.

Rick threw an arm around Warren. "How are you, pal?"

"Just took it up the
culo
in the 416th," Warren said. "Eight years for a kid who dry-humped a fourteen-year-old girl in a high school playground."

"He should have fucked her instead — she might have liked it and never complained." Rick asked, "Did you tell him that for future reference?"

Bob Altschuler stepped aboard the elevator. Although he usually had the shaggy solemnity of a woolly mammoth, the prosecutor looked pleased with himself. He nodded at the defense attorneys.

"How come you're so happy now?" Warren asked. "You must have fucked somebody over really good."

Altschuler's smile faded and he muttered something the two other lawyers failed to catch. He got off the elevator at the second floor.

"Can't stand that man," Warren said.

"I have a feeling he noticed."

"There's a guy enjoys putting people behind bars for as long as the law will allow. Probably jacks off every night thinking about it."

"You're in an interesting mood today," Rick said.

In the basement cafeteria, under fluorescent lighting that washed out all shadows from faces, they sipped coffee from plastic cups. Rick said, "I'm in the 252nd with a client who delivered five kilos of crack cocaine. So I try to crank up a plea but the state won't go for less than thirty years. My client says, 'Fuck y'all, let's go to trial.' I couldn't convince him you can't trust your fate to twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty."

Warren had barely listened. "Lou Parker's got a new court coordinator," he said, "who doesn't seem to know what happened between me and the judge three years ago. Parker's looking for a young lawyer, she claims, to appoint to a capital — a wetback shot some Vietnamese. Didn't know I qualified as young anymore, but I walked in at the right time. Or maybe the wrong time."

Rick's olive-colored face split into a frown. "Parker won't give a capital to you."

"That's what I think. But if I can get it, I want it."

"You ready to put on the gloves again with the lady hyena?"

"It's not my heart's desire, but I'll handle it."

A bleak look, a vexation of the spirit, showed on Rick's face. "Listen to your old buddy," he said. "Parker has a sign on her desk: THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERDESS — I SHALL NOT WANT. She smokes on the bench but she won't allow anyone else to smoke in her courtroom. Won't allow women lawyers to wear open-toed shoes. I took an old black janitor before her once on some chickenshit possession charge. She kept calling him 'boy' — that man will go his grave remembering that. If you go to trial in the 299th and the jury awards probation, Lou Parker automatically gives your client thirty days in jail as a condition of it. She's telling you, 'Dare to waste my time, I'll teach you a lesson.' It's court rental."

Both lawyers laughed thinly.

"See, we're laughing," Rick said, "but that's cruel."