Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (6 page)

Warren checked the time on the wall clock. He drained the last sip of coffee. "I have to go."

"Watch yourself," Rick counseled. "She's got a long memory. If there's a way the bitch can hurt you, she'll dig a tunnel to find it."

The court coordinator slyly said, "Judge has been waiting
on you for ten minutes, Mr. Blackburn."

Warren knocked on the oak door of Judge Parker's chambers, then twisted the brass knob and walked in. The room was spacious, its windows facing westward: framed against a vehemently hot blue sky were the rotunda of the civil courthouse and the gothic rise of the Republic Bank Building. On the wall, flanking her diplomas, Judge Parker displayed oversized framed photographs of George Bush and John Wayne. The bookshelves were lined with volumes of the South Western Reporter Texas Cases and the Harvard Classics. Warren didn't remember any such hint of literacy, but then he recalled that on his last visit, three years ago, he had been blind to everything but dishonor.

Lou Parker sat behind her cluttered desk, square-faced, frowning, chewing on the eraser at the end of a pencil, and holding a long filter cigarette in one hand. She waved Warren into a leather armchair.

With no preamble, she asked, "You want this capital?"

Warren stayed silent a moment. Why would he
not
want it? It was a way to begin to crawl back from the basement of criminal law into the high-rent district. He wondered what Parker had in mind, and then the answer occurred to him. She might well need a lawyer who would do what he was told, someone she could step on. It had been known to happen. Some judges were less than impartial.

But he would have to take that risk. "I want it," he replied.

"What do you really know about me?" Judge Parker asked.

He wondered again what she meant. He knew that she was divorced with grown children, had been one of the first women defense attorneys in the county, ran the 299th like a German railway station. And doesn't like me.

But he quickly realized that he had been asked a rhetorical question.

"In '53," Lou Parker said, "I graduated SMU with a degree in Accounting. Got married, started raising children. Woke up one morning and said, Hey, this is unskilled labor, any redneck woman from the back bayou can do this. So I went downtown to an oil company I heard had an opening in Accounting. You want to know what happened?"

Warren understood it was his job to move his head briefly in either a vertical or horizontal direction, and it didn't matter which.

"They turned me down because I was a woman. Guy told me that to my face. Real sorry, he said, but also real proud he was being so honest. So I said, 'Fuck you, fuck your dog, and fuck the horse you rode in on.' I walked out of there and enrolled in law school. Twenty years a defense attorney. Got my court seven years ago when your daddy passed away."

Judge Parker stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray already overflowing.

"I'm not popular like Dwight Bingham and I don't give a shit. I do as I please, I say what I please. You defense attorneys complain about me because I don't let you get away with the stuff you're used to getting away with. I run a tough courtroom. I get things done and I know what I'm doing. Unlike some others whose names I won't mention."

There was a certain amount of truth to that, Warren knew. Texas judges were elected — the only requisites were party backing and five years as a member of the bar. On his first day in office, a certain judge, a one-time insurance adjuster, had walked into his new chambers as the preceding judge was clearing out his law books. With some anxiety the new judge asked his law clerk, "Do I have to buy those books too?"

"The D.A.'s office doesn't much care for me," Parker rasped, "because I don't take crap from them. This is
my
courtroom — you better get that straight. No speeches for the peanut gallery. No tricks. Hint of a stunt like you pulled four years ago, you're out on your ass. You can fish in the bayou for a living."

Judge Parker waited, but this time Warren did not nod his head.

"I'm giving you this capital," she said, "because you finally had the guts to walk in and ask for a case, and I suppose every son of a bitch on this earth deserves a second chance. It's no great shakes, because it's a whale in a barrel for the state, but it's better than you've had in a long time. Just move it along. I'm not saying the defendant's guilty — I'm not allowed to say that. But I'm telling you that all the prosecutor has to do in this case is take aim and squeeze the trigger. So don't waste my time, understand? I expect you to plead it out for whatever you can get."

There it was. It could not have been clearer.

Lou Parker's dark eyes glinted. She blew cigarette smoke in the general direction of his face. "Now go see your client."

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the park opposite the eight-story ugly granite monolith of the courthouse, Warren found a quiet bench under an oak tree. He bought a hot dog from a vendor and ate it while he studied the
Quintana
file. Some mustard dripped onto the pages. Warren wiped it off with his breast pocket handkerchief.

An hour later he settled into a steel-backed chair in a Harris County Jail visitor's cubicle, as he once had with Virgil Freer. A modern facility, a massive cube twelve stories high — air-conditioned, computerized, with closed-circuit TV — the jail was never silent. Men yelled, women wept, telephones jangled, doors clanged. Warren sat at a shiny bare metal desk under fluorescent lighting so garishly bright that it made his eyes ache. He talked to Hector Quintana through a metal grill.

Quintana had smooth skin, black hair, an uncomplicated face. Warren guessed they were about the same age.

"Mr. Quintana, do you understand English?"

Quintana nodded, but Warren saw the uncertainty in the man's brown eyes.

He kept his speech simple. "My name is Warren Blackburn, and I'm a lawyer appointed by the court to represent your interests because you don't have the money to hire your own lawyer. The State of Texas will pay my fee, but I don't want you to think for one minute that means I work for them. I work for you now, Mr. Quintana, unless you have any objections to me. If you do, you'll have to explain them to Judge Parker. There's nothing you tell me about this case that I'll ever repeat to another living soul unless I have your permission. I'm bound by a solemn oath — what we lawyers call confidentiality and lawyer-client privilege. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Sir," Quintana said, "I didn't do what they say I did."

Warren ignored that. He would never ask Quintana if he had done it. That was the first rule of a criminal defense attorney, carved into his mind from the day he began practicing.

"Do you trust me?" Warren said.

"Yes, sir."

"Let's get rolling."

Warren formally told Hector Quintana that he had been accused of murdering, on or about the night of May 19, 1989, in Harris County, a man named Dan Ho Trunh, an electrician by trade, twenty-seven years old, married, the father of two children—

"I doan know this man," Quintana said.

"Let me finish, please."

Slowly, now and then using some of the Spanish he had learned in San Miguel de Allende, Warren explained that the indictment returned by the grand jury was for capital murder, because it was believed that the offense took place during the course of a robbery — Dan Ho Trunh's wallet had not been found on his person or in his car. Texas law mandated that if Hector Quintana stood trial and was found guilty of capital murder, or instead pled guilty to the court, there were only two possible penalties: life in prison or death by injection.

Quintana gasped. "But I doan kill this man. I doan know him. I try to rob a store,
nada más."

Warren was used to this sequence. Few lawyers had ever introduced themselves to an accused murderer who said, "Glad to meet you, counselor. Sure I killed the sleazebag, and if you gave me the chance I'd do it again."

That came later, down a long road filled with rocky detours.

"Hector, suppose you tell me your version of what happened on the evening of May 19."

"I was
borrachito,"
Quintana said. A little drunk.

"Where do you live?"

With friends near the stables in Hermann Park. In the evenings, behind a shed, they fried pork cracklings in a pot of deep fat. Sometimes they cooked
menudo,
a kind of tripe soup that was wonderful for a hangover. When he first came here he had pumped gas at a Mobil station. He had lost the job because he showed up one time
borrachito
and then hadn't shown up another time because of, he seemed to remember, the same reason. Later he worked as a handyman in a convenience store, a 7-Eleven. The 7-Eleven was a good job, but the franchise had been sold to a Vietnamese who paid Hector a week's wages and let him go because a brother-in-law wanted the job.

"Did that upset you?" Warren asked.

"I had no work. It wasn't fair."

Bad, Warren thought. If the D.A.'s office didn't know it now, they would surely find out.
"And you were angry at being fired, weren't you, Mr. Quintana? And isn't it a fact that after you were fired you harbored a grudge against all Vietnamese people?"

Since February he had lived by doing odd jobs — cutting wood, knocking on people's doors and offering to wash cars for two dollars — but in April he gave up his bed in a barrio
rooming house in order to save the rent and send money back to Francisca. That was when he began to sleep with his friends Pedro and Armando in the park by the stables. The
policia
didn't bother them if they were quiet. A few times he was asked to help clean up horseshit, and given five dollars for a morning's shoveling.

He found a shopping cart one day from the Safeway—

"Found? Where did you find it, Hector?"

"In the street, I doan remember…" But Quintana flushed, looked ashamed.

Warren didn't care. You had to batter at them a bit, make them see that it made no sense to tell petty lies. Big lies like
"I didn't do it"
were all right for a time. But the little lies blazed like neon. They could cost more than they were worth.

"You stole the shopping cart from the Safeway parking lot, isn't that so?"

"I found it. Maybe someone else stole it.
Yo no
— not I."

A stubborn man. But maybe it was true. You never knew. In theory, never quite translated into practice, you were innocent until proved guilty.

Quintana related to Warren the various treasures and staples he had inherited from apartment house Dumpsters and his wonder that they had been discarded while they still had a useful life. He went often to Ravendale and it was there, on that night, that he had found what was left of a bottle of whiskey. And
la pistola.

After finishing the last swallow of Old Crow, Hector Quintana said, he
decided to change his luck and rob the Circle K up on Bissonet. He shrugged, as
if to say to Warren: this was no big deal. These are hard times. A man grows weary and relaxes his principles. The pistol was not loaded, and he was glad of that. But he believed that if he pointed it at the clerk in the store and ordered him to hand over what was in the cash register, the clerk would be frightened enough to do so without any fuss.

"There is something I wish you to understand," Quintana said, seeming to change course, looking at his lawyer with a clear gaze. "If I had not been a little drunk, I would not have done this thing."

Or not have been able to do it, Warren thought. He remembered what Altschuler had said that morning: intoxication does not negate the crime.

The clerk in the Circle K claimed he couldn't get the cash register open. It often jammed like this, there was nothing to do except bang away. He said, Hector recalled, "Please don't shoot me, I'm doing my best." Finally the drawer crashed open, whereupon, in slow motion, he handed Hector a little over $120 in small bills and loose change.

"I was so happy," Hector told Warren, "that I thanked him. I went out into the street. But by then the police were there. They were so quick! I couldn't believe it…"

Two HPD cops leaped from a blue-and-white, revolvers drawn.
"Police!
Freeze, asshole! Drop the weapon at your feet! Kick it away from you!"

Hector had seen this scene so many times on TV that it seemed unreal, and yet at the same time he knew exactly what was required of him. Without being asked, he turned to lean against a nearby car so that they could frisk him and cuff him.

"Did they tell you that you had the right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer, and so forth?"

"Yes, it was the same as on TV."

Only late the next day, here in jail, did the matter of murder arise. He couldn't believe they were serious. He told them they had the wrong man. But it was clear that they didn't believe him.

Warren asked him where he had been earlier on the evening of May 19, before he arrived at Ravendale.

Walking around, just thinking about Francisca and his children. He was from El Palmito, a village near the city of San Luis Potosi in north-central Mexico. He had married at the age of twenty. He was given a scrawny milk cow as a gift from his in-laws, a sway-backed burro from his father, and a patch of bare land on the bank of a stream where warm mineral water flowed. Still, in the end, with the rising prices, it was not enough to live on.

"And in those hours before you found the gun in the Dumpster, did you talk to anyone? Did you meet anyone you knew?"

He had knocked on a few doors, Quintana recalled, to ask if anyone wanted their car washed. No one had wanted.

Warren thought diligently for a minute. "Let's focus on
la pistola,
Hector. It's the same one that was used to murder a Vietnamese man earlier that evening, and the fact that you had it in your possession is very bad. You understand that, don't you?"

"There were no bullets in it," Quintana said. "I tole you."

"Did you ever show that pistol to anyone? To any of your friends at the stables?"