Still, I don’t have to put up with this shit, I’m the customer. “They’re charged, ace,” I inform him, feeling the heat blistering the inside of my skull, “but they haven’t been tried. And until they are, and found guilty, if they’re found guilty, which I doubt will happen, they are innocent. That’s the way it works. Okay?”
He scowls at me. “No. It ain’t okay. They’re guilty and ever’body knows it and you can take that trial shit and shove it up your ass.”
“Fuck you.” Now I say it out loud.
He looks for a moment like he’s going to try something, but I’m half a foot taller, thirty pounds heavier, and ten years younger. He retreats behind his scowl.
“They’re guilty, mister.” His voice rises. “They’re guiltier’n hell and the world knows it. And the best shyster lawyer, which is what you are if you’re for them, can’t turn that around.” He shakes his head in anger that he can’t clean my clock. “Now get the hell out of my store and don’t show your face in here again.”
I turn and walk out without a glance back, slamming the door for good measure.
Outside, leaning against my car, I find myself shaking; anger’s what I feel, not fear. Pissants like him don’t scare me, I’ve run across dozens of them, they’re all mouth. It’s what he represents that’s frightening and sobering: the state of New Mexico has already tried and convicted my clients. It’s been all over the newspapers, television, the works. It’s relatively quiet now, but once the trial convenes all the hubbub will start up again, scum boiling to the top.
The hot dogs are surprisingly good, spicy. I wipe the chili from my mouth, littering the front of the store with the wrappings. Looking back, I see him glaring out at me, a rabid badger foaming inside his hole. The incident sickens me, but I know there’ll be a lot more like this one.
It’s hot out, the sun rising quickly, but I’m shivering in an envelope of my own clammy sweat as I drive off, heading home to decisions that won’t wait any longer.
LONE WOLF FLIPS through the résumés. The others watch him. I can feel the heat rising, even though the interview room’s air-conditioned to a fault. He tosses the papers onto the conference table that separates us.
“This is a joke, right? You couldn’t bring us a Bugs Bunny video so you brought us this.” I’m getting to hate those cold blue eyes: this guy can go an hour without blinking.
I maintain silence, cool and calm; outwardly, anyway. I’ve learned over the last month to cut him plenty of slack.
“A cunt, a spic, and some over-the-hill rummy who probably can’t find his ass with both hands and a wheelbarrow?” he yells, pounding both fists on the table. Hard. His hands work in unison; they have to, he and the others are in full irons: arms, legs and waist. He grabs the stapled résumés and tears them in half, quarters, eighths. “Wipe your ass with this,” he informs me, laying that blue-eyed devil stare on me again.
I gather up the remnants, drop them in the circular file behind me. “You’re the boss,” I tell him evenly. Very calmly, deliberately, I stuff their files into my hand-tooled leather briefcase, stand, take my suit-coat from where I’d draped it over the chair, shoot my cuffs, put the jacket on. Slowly, letting them see it, never taking my eyes off them for a second. I pick up the briefcase, turn towards the door.
“Where’re you going?” Roach asks. He’s apprehensive, his look darting back and forth between Lone Wolf and me. There’s a flicker of uncertainty. I see it in the others’ eyes as well; I was counting on it.
“Out,” I answer dryly. “To tell the District Attorney that you no longer seek my representation. It’s a formality that has to be observed,” I add, “so he can go to the court and request suitable counsel for each of you.”
“What in the fuck …” Lone Wolf starts.
“I’ll have my secretary check the time I’ve already put in,” I say. “Whatever’s left over I’ll refund by the end of the week.” I bang on the door to let the guard sitting on the other side know that I want out.
“Wait a minute.” We all turn to Goose, who’s probably more surprised at hearing himself speak up than any of the rest of us. “Are you saying you’re quitting us?”
“No. I’m saying you just fired me,” I tell him.
“No way!” Roach is standing now, his face flushing, the wine-colored birth-mark throbbing against the veins in his neck. “How do you figure that one?”
“Ask El Jefe,” I say, turning to Lone Wolf, who’s staring daggers at me, “he’s the man with the answers.”
“Fuck you, Alexander.”
“Not with your dick, mister.”
It’s showdown time. And I’m the only one who’s holding any cards.
“Am I wrong? Did I misread your intentions?” I’m sick of this jive dance we’ve been waltzing around the floor with, this bullshit macho gamesmanship. He’s going to learn right now that I’m calling the shots, if he doesn’t we’ll never get through the trial.
He smiles at me; disarming bastard. “No problema. We merely want the best.”
“And that’s what you got.” The guard’s opened the door, his head sticking in. I shake mine; he retreats, closing the door and locking us in again. “For this trial, for you—who you are, and what you’re paying”—I can’t not say it, we all live in a finite world—“you’ve got the best.”
“No bullshit?” He’s serious.
“No bullshit.”
“Any of ’em Jews?” Goose asks.
“No,” I tell him. Jesus, what is it with these guys, do they hate (or at least distrust) every minority in the world? “Why, are you down on Jews as well?”
“No, no,” he answers quickly, “they’re good lawyers. Best lawyer I ever had was a Jew. I mean I’d prefer one if you had one,” he concludes lamely.
“Yeh, me too,” Dutchboy chimes in, “they’ve got the smarts up here,” he taps his temple, “know what I mean?”
I laugh. “Sorry I couldn’t come up with one on short notice, but the lawyers I’ve picked are just as good. Trust me.”
“We don’t have a choice.” Lone Wolf is serious now, all business. “Do we?”
“Not as long as I’m on this case.”
“All right then.”
“They’re outside waiting. I’ll bring them in. And one more thing …”
I let it dangle. Dutchboy takes the bait.
“What?”
“No more games. No more ego-tripping, playing with my head. I’m straight with you, you’re straight with me. I say what and when. You say yes or no. This case is a bed of thorns, gentlemen. You’ve got to let me work. Agreed?”
They exchange looks; the other three looking to Lone Wolf.
“Agreed,” he says.
I bang on the door and tell the guard to escort my colleagues in. Then I turn back to the bikers. “It’s going to be fine,” I tell them.
“We’re trusting you, remember?” Lone Wolf tells me.
“I’m trying,” I answer truthfully. “You don’t make it easy.”
The door swings open. Their eyes pop as Mary Lou is the first to walk in. Roach starts to say something (about her breasts, vagina, legs, or a combination of them), but Lone Wolf nails him with a glance that says: ‘this is going to be professional, forget about your cock.’ Roach turns away, flushing, his entire face turning the color of his birth-mark, as if his thoughts had been projected on the blackboard on the wall. Mary Lou’s so business-like she doesn’t even notice; or she’s faking it convincingly.
She’s followed by Tommy and Paul, who take seats on our side of the table. Each group looks at the other, trying it on for size. For the next several months we’ll all be tighter than family.
I introduce the bikers first, saying a little about each in turn, noting that I’ve prepared informational files on all of them. That’s not the purpose of this meeting; this is so we can see each other, put faces with names, make it about people, not abstract numbers and charges on a bill of particulars.
Then I intr
oduce the lawyers to the bikers, just the facts, not bragging on them; but the facts are solid, these are all quality people, the bikers see that right off—they’re going to be in good hands: it had taken me a lot of soul-searching and not a small amount of arm-twisting to put this combination together. I wasn’t sure who I could enlist in the cause. Your better lawyers don’t build careers and reputations on long-odds cases; Perry Mason and all the other hot-shot television lawyers to the contrary, good defense lawyers want to win their cases, the majority of them anyway, they want to know going in they’ve at least got a decent shot at it. That’s how they become known as good defense lawyers. They only want it to appear that they’re bucking the odds; even your flaming ACLU types are conservatives at heart, dikes against the oceans of anarchy, otherwise they wouldn’t be lawyers. And given the personalities and the situation, a decent shot wasn’t the way anyone was characterizing this case.
I knew I would pull one member of the team from the Public Defender’s office, not only to cut costs, but because they’re experienced in this. The third would be an up-and-comer from one of the established firms that was willing to take a flyer on making a future partner’s reputation with an improbable win; a can’t-lose situation. As for the fourth, most probably a contract lawyer from the P.D.’s list, who with any luck wouldn’t be a drunk or a fuckup. I knew I could pretty much count on the court not letting that happen; this case is too important to the state to get it turned on appeal because of incompetence or malfeasance.
Tommy Rodriguez is the public defender. He came up the hard way, one of those success stories you read about in Reader’s Digest—born in a melon patch to Mexican parents working the bracero program, for openers. That he ever enrolled in an American school is in itself a minor miracle; that he kept going, from school to school across the south as his family came up year after year from the Mexican mountains, is overwhelming. An old-maid English teacher in Tallahassee, Florida, took him under her wing in eighth grade and became his legal guardian, and from there it was one triumph after another: top of his class in high school, full ride at Duke, UVa Law (Law Review, Coif, the works). When the old lady retired she moved to New Mexico for the dry air, and he came with her like the most dutiful of sons, which is why he’s a New Mexico state P.D. instead of pulling down six figures from a Wall Street firm. That’ll come someday; he’s only twenty-six. He told me he got offers last year from firms in L.A. and New York. He’s biding his time and paying some dues: when he makes his move he wants to go with clout. Being on a major murder case like this one is exactly what he’s been looking for.
The rising star from the big firm—Simpson and Wallace, one of the big three in the state, with over sixty lawyers, which is gargantuan for New Mexico—is Mary Lou Bell. As my buddy Travis from Austin would say, this woman is complete. She’s young (barely thirty), she’s smart, she’s competitive, she does her homework, and to top it off she’s got beauty-queen looks; Kathleen Turner with a Phi Beta Kappa key. Under different circumstances I’d sniff around, make a pass, just to say I was there, like a dog leaving his mark. But I have enough self-control (I keep assuring myself) to keep from shitting where I eat, and something in her body language tells me it would be a bad move, anyway; she doesn’t want picked-over goods. So we’re good buddies. One of the guys, who just happens to wear skirts and high heels. As I had assumed, Simpson and Wallace is absorbing most of her fee. I didn’t even have to twist their arms particularly hard; they’re happy she’s getting the exposure. It can only help them.
Paul Marlor is the potential joker in the group. He’s a generation older than the rest of us, in his sixties I’d guess, although I don’t know for sure. He was a major east coast lawyer, Philadelphia or somewhere (he’s never been forthcoming with the details), dropped out in the sixties, bailing out on his wife and children, surfaced here about ten years ago with a young wife and a baby and started a single practice. He’s an excellent lawyer, gets to the heart of a case with a jeweler’s precision, and only works as much as he has to, to maintain a modest lifestyle; protection against burning out again. His son and my daughter are in school together, we became acquaintances through PTA. He’s a good guy, holds his Scotch with the best of them, is always happy to help. There’s something solid about him; maybe it comes with age, like liver spots and loss of hearing. He adds ballast to our group. The others will defer to him on procedure. He’ll defer to me—it’s my case. And he came cheap, a necessary consideration.
All in all (metaphorically patting myself on the back), a formidable foursome.
We meet for an hour. Nothing specific, we’re feeling each other out, first-date stuff. I’ve already gone over the state’s case with my new associates, they pretty much know what to expect.
My task today is to assign each client his lawyer; I’d made my choices before I brought in the team, but I wanted to wait to announce them on the off-chance there’d be a case of bad chemistry in one of the pairings. There wasn’t; I knew each of the bikers well enough to know what was right.
Dutchboy gets Paul: the old pro and the wild kid, Mark Twain and Huck Finn. Paul will have a soothing influence on Dutchboy; probably the first stable influence in his life.
I assign Tommy to Goose, a reverse of Dutchboy and Paul. It’s the kind of pairing a jury loves without even knowing it. Goose has the best chance of getting off of any of the bikers, and Tommy, being Hispanic, gets brownie points in a state that’s strong in its Spanish heritage and proud of it. I could see the rapport in the way that they grinned at each other, Goose eager to please, the old dog who’s been kicked around and wants a warm place by the fire, and Tommy who understands what it is to be needed.
Roach gets his wish: Mary Lou. I’d discussed this with her before I brought her in; he’s going to be the one who appears to be the most off-the-wall, in some ways more dangerous even than Lone Wolf, whose native intelligence will be manifest. It’s a black and white role reversal: the woman, strong and competent to be sure but also feminine and traditional (she’ll always be in demure skirts and dresses, not in female lawyer’s clothes and not provocative), the man bowing to her judgment, so that by the time it goes to the jury, Roach will have been softened in their minds, defanged. And I knew deep down that Goose and Dutchboy would in some way have been uncomfortable with Mary Lou; she’s too much woman for them. Roach’ll test her once or twice, she’ll slap him down like swatting a fly, and he’ll be put in his place.
We make individual appointments for tomorrow. Most of the time we’ll be together under joint work-product privilege, but each man needs to know his attorney, get close. And I need time alone with Lone Wolf, because he’s the case: if I can walk him, the others will follow.
The bikers are sorry to see us go. It’s scary inside, no matter how tough you are. The idea that you may spend the rest of your life in a six-by-nine barred room, or worse, get fried, is enough to sober anyone who isn’t crazy. And these men aren’t crazy; they just act like it, and it’s haunting them now.
We talk over coffee.
“They could be innocent,” Mary Lou says with some surprise.
“They’re certainly getting screwed,” Tommy adds. “This is the most political case I’ve ever seen.”
“Get used to it,” Paul counsels him, stirring two sugars in his cup, “politics is what this trial’s going to be about. A situation like this, innocence or guilt has damn little to do about it.”
He’s low-keying it; you learn to do that with experience. You don’t judge your clients, you represent them. You don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment or how you handle your defense. You do your job as best you can, and you let the bleeding hearts get the ulcers.
We’ll get together tomorrow after we’ve met with our clients individually, start comparing notes. I’m happy that they believe as I do; that whether or not the bikers are innocent (they’re all, in varying degrees, withholding judgment so far), the state’s definitely fucking them. It’ll give us a buoyancy and optimi
sm that’ll make preparation less of a grind and more of a crusade.
Mary Lou lingers a moment after the others leave. I’m tempted to ask her to dinner, especially when she puts her hand on mine.
“I want to thank you for calling me in, Will,” she says. “I needed this. You don’t know how badly.” She stares at me. She’s sitting close enough that I can smell her perfume. She wears Chanel No. 5. It’s intoxicating.
“I’m glad that you’re glad.” Come on, man, I exhort myself, snap to, you sound like a dork.
“This is exciting, isn’t it? The kind of case that reminds you of why you became a lawyer. Making an honest-to-God difference,” she proclaims, punctuating her sincerity by whacking her palm hard on the table, “instead of all that high-priced hand-holding I have to do at Simpson and Wallace.” She stares hard at me: her eyes are huge, Paul Newman-like blue (probably contacts but so what?), shining with the fervor of the committed defender of the accused.
“That’s why I like my practice. What I do matters, even if only a little,” I add modestly. I’m all but fluttering my eyelashes to show what a good and committed guy I am.
“Don’t hesitate to call on me anytime. I mean that, Will. We’re in this twenty-four hours a day.”
I nod. I’ve got to eat, might as well …
“Except for tonight,” she smiles sympathetically, albeit crisply. “I’ve got a dinner date.”
“Me too, as a matter of fact.” I smile back, letting her know that while I appreciate her total commitment I certainly have no intention of imposing on her private life.
Shit. That was too close.
I stand in the doorway, watching her leave. Nothing wrong with the view from here, either. Snap out of it, Alexander, I admonish myself. She’s a colleague, not a potential fuck.
It would’ve been the wrong move, I saw it coming, and I almost hit on her anyway. Stop me before I kill again, or whatever the equivalent is for dipshits like me. I’m going to tattoo it on my hand if I have to: keep business strictly business. It’ll be better all around. Safer, anyway.
Against the Wind Page 12
