He did most of the talking at the jail. It was almost as if our roles had been reversed.
Chris Wagner, only nineteen, understood the criminal justice system a lot better than most Supreme Court justices. He knew my function in these circumstances was more that of an agent than an advocate. If he had been a rock star I’d be bargaining for a percentage of the gate and playdates. But he was a burglar, so I’d bargain to see he didn’t play state prison, and to get the shortest probation and the lowest fine.
Chris Wagner knew a lot about the law but not enough about alarm systems. He had efficiently shut off one without knowing the gallery had a backup, a silent alarm, the one the police had answered.
He was guilty as hell and admitted it. The threat of going to trial could be used only as a nuisance tactic with the prosecutor, something to negotiate with, the prospect of tying up a courtroom, jury, judge, and officers for maybe a day. It wasn’t much of a bargaining chip, but the courts were busy, and it was the only one I had.
I told Chris I would appear with him at court on Monday morning. I’d know then who Evola would have handling the case. If we couldn’t make a deal, bail would be set. It would be up to his father to decide whether to post it.
I left the jail in a much better mood than the day I had first seen Angel Harwell there.
Chris Wagner was different from Angel. He was a businessman. True, his business was burglary, but there was meaning and purpose in it. He understood the risks, the rewards, the dangers. He understood the legal system. It was almost refreshing.
It was good being busy again. In the old days I had handled a steady parade of criminal and civil cases, juggling court dates, keeping occupied, making money. It had been hectic and stressful but I had managed it all by drinking my way through.
It wouldn’t be half bad if clients came streaming in again. I wondered if I could really handle that kind of life sober. If I could, it would be very much like a dream come true.
11
TO ANYONE BUT A LAWYER, THE MORNING ACTIVITY in a courthouse looks as chaotic as a bread riot. Lawyers, witnesses, clients, cops, and other officials mill about like anxious cattle waiting to enter the killing pens.
But to the attorney the morning melee is as predictable and recognizable as an oft-performed ballet. There is a flowing tide of humanity swirling around clumps of bargaining lawyers, and collections of witnesses huddled about lawyers who, like coaches, whisper last-minute instructions to players about to go into the big game.
By Monday morning the weekend rain had ended. The Kerry County courthouse bustled as usual on this bright, beautiful morning. Usually no new trials were scheduled for Monday morning, which was reserved for other court work. The courthouse was a busy legal factory, and it was more concerned with quantity than quality.
I looked for David Wagner, my client’s father, in the mob outside Judge Mulhern’s courtroom. As district judge, Mulhern handled arraignments as well as a parade of misdemeanor cases. Wagner wasn’t inside the courtroom either.
The three circuit judges had courtrooms on the second floor. I thought he might have gone up there by mistake so I went looking for him.
Judge Theodore Brown was hearing miscellaneous motions. His courtroom and the hallway outside his door contained a mob consisting mostly of lawyers. Some would be asking for various kinds of temporary relief in all kinds of civil cases. Other lawyers, their opponents, were doing everything in their power to see that the relief requested wasn’t granted.
The area around Judge Phillip Swanson’s courtroom was so crowded it looked like he was running a sale. He had the mornings divorce docket. Michigan is a so-called no-fault divorce state, so the only real contests anymore are over property and kids. The divorce procedure itself is now as cut and dried as getting a driver’s license renewed. Judge Swanson’s part of the hallway was jammed by sympathetic lawyers and their clients, mostly women, who were waiting for the five-minute ceremony, complete with testimony, that would officially snip the legal ties of marriage. Judges can marry people and they can divorce them. Both ceremonies take about the same amount of time.
My destination was the far courtroom of Judge Kevin Collins, who had the morning criminal docket, his chief business being sentencing those previously found guilty.
The benches outside his courtroom door were filled with a mixed crowd. Most were defendants, some were their friends, some were their victims. Nobody looked very happy to be there.
Inside the jammed courtroom, Judge Collins, a squat, bald man, presided with the patience and sympathy of someone who would rather be in Philadelphia, snarling out sentences and dispositions as the morning parade slowly passed before him.
Wagner was there, seated with other spectators, dressed exactly as he had been in my office. A worn-looking woman, as faded as her print dress, sat next to him. I presumed she was Mrs. Wagner. I extracted them from that mob, escorted them down to the mob below, and found a seat for them in Mulhern’s courtroom.
Attorneys who had never acknowledged my existence before nodded and smiled as I worked my way forward to the clerk handling arraignments. For a while, at least, thanks to the Harwells, I was a star.
Chris Wagner sat with other prisoners, jammed together on a long bench at the side of the courtroom, watched over by two bored court officers. I nodded when I made eye contact with my client.
The clerk directed me to the assistant prosecutor assigned to the case. The prosecutor was a tiny thing, pretty in a tough way. She conducted some business with two other attorneys before she got around to me.
“Sloan, right?” Her voice was as flinty as her eyes. She spoke low, harshly penetrating the noise of the courtroom without disturbing it.
I nodded.
“My name’s Stepanek. Who do you represent?”
“Christopher Wagner.”
She picked through the files she carried until she found my client’s. “The burglar,” she said.
“Alleged.”
“Alleged, my ass. They caught him inside the joint. What do you want to do here?”
Judge Mulhern was scolding some lawyer for something but both the prosecutor and I ignored everything except the negotiation we were conducting.
“He has no convictions,” I said.
“One arrest.”
“Have you talked to him?” I asked.
“No.” She gestured at the files she had. “He’s just one of many on the list this morning.”
I pointed Chris out to her. “That’s him. The kid. He looks like he should be in grade school rather than here.”
“Skinny,” she said, but I saw that her eyes softened as she looked at him.
“Our only shot is to go to trial and hope the jury feels sorry for him. Like you say, you people have a pretty good case.”
“It’s a perfect case. And it’s one where we aren’t going to accept a plea to anything less than the main charge.”
I shrugged. “I can appreciate that. I’m more interested in the sentence than the charge.”
She cocked an interested eyebrow. “Plead on the nose. We can run him upstairs and have Collins accept the plea this morning. Judge Collins will do whatever we agree to. How about two years probation, first six months in jail?”
“Look at him. He wouldn’t last fifteen minutes before he became someone’s bride. How about probation with the provision that he return to school? He still has a year to go to finish high school.”
She started to shake her head, but then she looked at Chris again and that seemed to change her mind. “Okay. But if he doesn’t go to school, he goes to jail. School is an absolute condition of the probation.”
“It’s a deal. Are you sure the judge will go along?”
“The school thing will sell him. Collins talks tough, but he’s the softest judge in this building, at least with kids. He likes to think he can help young criminals.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Bullshit. Most of the little bastards come right back.�
� She glowered up at me. “Okay, Sloan, we’ll give your man a last chance. It’ll be probation and school. I’ll have the officers take him up to Judge Collins. You’ll have to wait your turn to plead him guilty. It’s busy up there this morning. The judge won’t sentence him today, he always requires a probation report, and that takes two weeks.”
“Suppose he changes his mind after he reads it?”
“He won’t. When you talk to the kid, tell him this isn’t some sham. If he drops out of school, he’ll drop right into Jackson Prison.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She studied me for a moment. “He’s lucky. It’s a good thing kindly old Judge Brown doesn’t have the criminal docket this morning. Everybody goes to jail. That’s Brown’s rule.”
“That’s what they say. I always try to stay away from him.” The eyebrow darted up again. “Then I guess Angel Harwell’s luck isn’t running too good, is it, if that’s the way you feel.”
That fleeting sympathy that I had seen in her eyes when she looked at Chris Wagner was now directed my way.
“The Harwell case,” she said in a whisper just loud enough to hear, “has been assigned to Judge Brown for trial.”
“What!”
She sighed. “I heard about it at the office before I came over here. My condolences.”
The noise and bustle in the courtroom seemed almost distant. Drawing judges was like shooting dice. If you rolled a seven, you won. If you rolled snake eyes, a two, you lost.
Theodore Brown was the judicial equivalent of snake eyes.
*
CHRIS Wagner liked getting probation, but he did not like having to go back to school, not until I suggested he take some electronics courses since burglar alarms were electronic devices. That appealed to his practical nature.
Getting through the plea had taken a while. I talked to his parents to explain what we were doing. Then we waited until his case was called. My part was brief, telling the judge that after careful consultation and explanation of all legal rights, Christopher Wagner, seeing the error of his youthful ways, had decided to plead guilty to the main charge.
Ms. Stepanek, my client, me, and Judge Collins knew the deal had been cut. But for the benefit of his courtroom audience, Collins rambled on as if no agreement had been struck. Like a preacher, he gave a long moralistic sermon about the evils of crime and the promise of earned redemption before he formally accepted the plea.
I had to make arrangements for Chris’s release on bail until sentencing.
Everything had taken longer than I had anticipated, so I got back to my office later than I had expected. The sun was shining, but my mood — after learning that Judge Brown would hear the Harwell case — was dismal. I drove back to my office and pulled into the parking lot next to my building.
“Well, I was beginning to think you stood me up,” Sidney Sherman said as he emerged from his big Cadillac. He hadn’t changed a bit. Still as thin, perhaps even thinner, with the same apologetic smile. “Whose name is that on your office door?”
“The last tenant. I’m going to have that changed.” We shook hands and I led the way up the outside stairway and into my office.
He sat down opposite the desk. “This place smells like an old sock, Charley. You should toss everything out and start fresh. And you should have a secretary. Jeez, this place doesn’t exactly inspire client confidence.”
“At the moment I have only one client. Whoops, make that two. They seem confident enough. Number two is why I was late. I was making arrangements with the local authorities for his future. Have you lost more weight, Sid?”
“Maybe. Who knows? What I’m able to eat wouldn’t keep a gerbil alive. But I’m not here for nutritional advice, am I?”
“No.”
“It’s not like when I was a cop, Charley. I didn’t mind sitting around then and chewing the fat on city time. But it’s my time now, and I do mind. Let’s get right to it, okay? I have things to do back in Detroit. First off, let me know what you know about this Harwell thing.” He took out a small notebook. “Shoot.”
I told him the story as factually as I could. He occasionally interrupted with a question but otherwise just listened and made notes. Just telling the story helped me organize things better in my own mind. I told Sid that having Brown as the trial judge would make a bad situation worse.
When I had finished, he sat quietly for a moment before saying anything. “Okay. I’m in the picture now. You’re going to want Angel Harwell checked out from cradle to present, right? School grades, who her friends are, what kind of trouble she’s been in, official and unofficial, correct?”
“And especially anything about her relationship with her father.”
Sid nodded his agreement. “That’s a given. We’ll look into her old man too, at least as far as his relationship with the kid’s concerned.”
“More than just that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Sid, I think there’s a chance this was a suicide.”
He snickered. “C’mon.”
“No. I’m serious. I know he was having some major trouble in business. Maybe enough to kill himself. See what you can come up with on that, okay? Also, anything else that might have spelled big trouble for him. Girlfriends, maybe. Even boyfriends. Who knows in these times? Gambling, drugs, booze. See if he was having any problems with things like that.”
“It will cost more if you want this done properly. I’ll have to hire people in Florida, and maybe other places too.”
“Money, for once, is no object. And all this is a job that has to be done.”
Again, he nodded, then closed the notebook and stuck it back in his pocket.
“I saw Angel on television,” he said. “Gorgeous broad. What’s she like?”
“She’s either scared to death or she’s really nuts.”
“Do you like her?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She seems, well, childlike in a way. I’m beginning to feel very protective.”
“Be careful. You wouldn’t be the first lawyer who fell for a client.”
“That won’t happen, Sid. She’s young enough to be my daughter.”
“Funny, that’s what those other guys said too. You know how it goes, Charley. You get an erection and the blood drains out of the brain and you can’t think right.”
“Not this time, Sid. I’m treating Angel as just another client.”
“Sure.” He laughed. “Say, it’s something, isn’t it, Morgan and Maguire working up here, and on this case? I never thought I’d see those two again. We’re old pals. I used to work vice with Morgan. A standup guy. While I’m up here I might as well hop over to your police department and see if they’re around. Maybe I’ll dig up something about the Harwells from them.”
“They won’t so much as burp when you tell them you’re working for me.”
The smile developed into a full-scale grin. “Maybe yes, maybe no. You forget, I’m pretty good at this sort of thing. If I get anything juicy, I’ll let you know,” The grin faded. “By the way, you got the ten thousand advance we discussed?”
I wrote him a check. He took it and examined it with a skeptical eye. “I don’t lay out cash for anything until this thing clears the bank. You do understand that?”
“The check’s good, Sid.”
“We’ll see.” Then he grinned again. “If it is, you just bought yourself a shitload of detective work.”
He tucked the check away and started to leave but stopped at the door. “You’re not a bad guy, Charley. It’s good to see you back in the game.”
And then he was gone.
*
I WAS going to miss lunch. Everything was running late and I heard Harry Hickham coming up the stairs. I glanced at my watch. It was one o’clock. Punctuality was almost a religion with him, and, as usual, he was precisely on time.
Hickham opened the door, squinted at me through his thick glasses, then glanced around the office. He looked more like an owl than ev
er.
“This place is like something out of Charles Dickens,” he said, walking across the worn carpet.
He didn’t even offer to shake hands as he gingerly lowered his plump body into one of my old chairs, obviously expecting it to collapse beneath him. “You need a decorator more than a public-relations expert. This joint would scare away starving alley cats. God, you used to have such flair, Charley.”
“I still do, I just hide it better now.”
“I saw Sid Sherman driving away. Is he going to work for you on this Harwell thing?”
“Yes,” I said. “How about lunch, Harry?”
He shook his head. “I just had mine. Besides, I don’t approve of doing business while eating. It’s a distraction. Now, where’s our young lady defendant?”
“Not here. She’s in New York. She’s scheduled to get back tonight.”
His large eyes blinked rapidly, a sign of annoyance. He ran a hand over his bald pate. “I presumed she’d be here. How can I set up a publicity campaign without talking to her? It’s like trying to do Romeo and Juliet without Juliet. I’m disappointed in you, Charley. You might have called and saved me the trip up here.”
“We don’t need her, Harry. I don’t think Angel is necessary at this point.”
“Oh? She’s the star in this drama. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. Every magazine, television commentator, and talk-show host is going to do a piece on this case. It’s a natural. It’s got everything — murder, beautiful women, decadent rich people, the conflict between children and parents, maybe even sex. This case has everything but Donald Trump and the Pope. Angel Harwell’s photo will be on the cover of every tabloid and magazine in America. Your little Angel is going to be tried and convicted for murder every day of the week unless we can get her out on the circuit and counter all the crap that’s sure to come.”
“We can’t put her out there, Harry.”
The blinking increased. “Are you going to pull the usual lawyer crap?” He scowled. “This is one time when silence isn’t golden. You think it’s too risky because the Harwell girl might say something they could use against her at trial, right?”
Shadow of A Doubt Page 17
