Local Rules

by Jay Brandon

  The courtroom was uncomfortably warm, as if the staff had shut off the air-conditioning when court ended. There was no one else in the room, which made the courtroom seem large and ominous, but Jordan felt peered at from behind cracked-open doors. “I’m sure you have things you want to ask me,” he said.

  “What’s going to happen to Wayne?” Charlotte Orkney said immediately. Her eyes hadn’t released Jordan once ex­cept when she rolled them in disgust.

  “The district attorney wants him to go to prison for a long time. He’s offered a fifty-year sentence. And Wayne said he’d take it”

  “Idiot,” she said. “Kevin wasn’t worth that. Well, he wasn’t. Besides, it was an accident”

  “Well, that’s not the way the law sees it Mrs. Orkney. If you’re beating someone up and he dies, that’s murder whether you intended to kill him or not”

  Mr. Orkney nodded again as if he already knew the law or was in perfect agreement with it. “Fifty years,” he said sadly, shaking his head.

  “It’s much too high an offer,” Jordan said. He hesitated and continued. “Somehow it’s tied up with Jenny Fecklewhite’s murder.”

  Mrs. Orkney nodded. “That was always the trouble, them being involved with Jenny. Now there was somebody who was already on her way out,” she said admiringly. “After she went off to that state speech tournament, she might’ve never come back.”

  “She had to come back for her senior year,” her hus­band said.

  “Maybe. They got high schools other places. Any rate, she wasn’t going to be hanging around here, like boys with no gumption.”

  ‘‘What was the problem with Jenny and Wayne and Kevin?” Jordan wanted clarified.

  “That she was too good for them. Ever’body knew that. I always knew it would lead to trouble. Didn’t think it’d be Jenny that got hurt, though,” Mrs. Orkney added sadly, sounding sorrier for the victim than for her son.

  Jordan let beats of silence pass while he thought. The Orkneys both sat straight and looked at him. “What are you going to do, Mr. Marshall?”

  That was a good question. “Try to get the DA to come down on his offer.” Hopeless. “We could plead guilty to the judge without accepting the State’s offer and let the judge decide the punishment.”

  Jordan didn’t know why he said that, since that was no longer a realistic option. Maybe he wanted to see how Wayne’s parents would react. They both nodded. “The judge might know best,” Mr. Orkney said, leading Jordan to believe the Orkneys weren’t in on the town’s secrets.

  There weren’t many more questions. Jordan promised to keep in touch, and the Orkneys left slowly, Mrs. Orkney talking vehemently, her husband making placating motions with his hands and his head. Jordan seemed to be watching them, but when the Orkneys turned aside, his stare didn’t follow. It was distant with distress. His problem was that he had seen innocent surprise on his client’s face at the sugges­tion that Wayne had killed Jenny Fecklewhite. Jordan never made the mistake of believing what his clients said, but he believed that astonished expression on Wayne’s face.

  Damn it, Wayne was innocent of Jenny’s murder. And that was the one they were going to hammer him for.

  Life reverted to normal when Jordan returned to San An­tonio. He stopped being a displaced person. He had an of­fice, he had a routine, he was part of a community where he was known, and he knew what to do. Familiarity was comforting, even when he was too busy or too idle, even when he was being pushed into trying a case he didn’t want to try or when a prosecutor was being less than reasonable.

  Not caring was a comfort, too. What Jordan’s clients were usually guilty of was felony stupid, but even when he stood at the bench beside one who was genuinely evil, who took pleasure in hurting people, no one looked at Jordan as if he were the guy’s co-defendant. After the sentencing, the court coordinator would shake Jordan’s hand and call him by name, and Jordan left the courtroom with a light heart while his client went out the other door in handcuffs. No big deal.

  In the rush of his days, Green Hills receded into its right­ful insignificance. But once in a while something reminded him of the case waiting there for him. He did research to be sure he was right in thinking that Wayne Orkney was guilty of murder even if he hadn’t intended to kill Kevin Wainwright, and the dry legal opinions dissolved into the faces of Wayne’s parents, attentively listening to Jordan talk, or into Wayne’s watery brown eyes opening wide at the suggestion that he had murdered Jenny. Sometimes he saw again, in imagination, the newspaper image of Jenny. Jordan remembered that happy, knowing expression of hers, the look of a girl on her way out.

  The week after his most recent visit to Green Hills, he was mentally teleported there again by the arrival in his office mail of a manila envelope bearing a slim burden of his own words. It was the transcript of the hearing, mailed to him by Laura Stefone, the court reporter in Judge Waverly’s court. No note introduced the document, the enve­lope just contained the transcript in its clear plastic cover. Jordan saw his own name on the front page as the attorney appearing for the defendant.

  The transcript was only a few pages. Jordan grimaced and settled himself to read. He’d read his own words in tran­script before. He was familiar with the phenomenon of words that had rung brilliantly in his own ears in a court­room being reduced to ungrammatical fragments and nonsensical drivel in a written record. But this time he wasn’t expecting to look good in print. He’d ordered the transcript only to make sure he hadn’t damaged his case. As unpre­pared as he’d been, he was confident that he hadn’t let any issues slip away permanently.

  As he began to read, the scene came back to him but from a new perspective. In the written record, Judge Waverly’s explaining of his court’s local rules to the arrogantly unready out-of-town lawyer sounded courteous, even kindly. Jordan began to see the scene through Laura Stefone’s eyes. Her judgment sat on every page of the transcript. Judge Waverly spoke in complete sentences with grammatical correctness and a certain classical tone. The few sentences Mike Arrien­dez had injected into the proceeding were brisk and to the point.

  Jordan, on the other hand, sounded like the village idiot. Laura Stefone had captured every “uh” and aborted sen­tence he had sputtered. Jordan had seen that in transcripts before. One could read the court reporter’s opinion of the speaker by whether she bothered to clean up his speech for him. Laura Stefone had done that for everyone in the courtroom that day except the out-of-town clown. Jordan’s shoulders hunched as he read on. That’s okay, hardly any­one reads transcripts. Especially transcripts from Green Hills, Texas.

  But Laura Stefone had done something more to him. When Jordan reached the point in the transcript at which he had formally requested a continuance to another day for his motion to suppress evidence, there was no response in the record from Judge Waverly. Had he spoken? Jordan remembered the request had been denied, but he couldn’t remember if the judge had actively said so or if the implica­tion had just been clear. Damn, he had fallen for that. If the judge hadn’t ruled on Jordan’s request in the record, there was nothing for Jordan to appeal if the judge’s denial of more time was erroneous, as Jordan believed it was. Clever trial judges tried to avoid ruling on requests at all for this very reason, but good defense lawyers forced them to do so. Judge Waverly had beaten Jordan on this one.

  But on the next one it was the court reporter herself who had killed him.

  After his request for more time had been denied, Jordan had saved himself and his motion to suppress evidence by asking the judge to let him raise the issue during trial. Judge Waverly had granted that request, Jordan remembered clearly. The evidence about Wayne’s arrest and the admis­sions he’d made at the time would come up at trial. Jordan had asked that the judge rule, after hearing that evidence, whether the jury should be allowed to hear the statements Wayne had made. .. before submitting the issue to the jury,” Jordan had said. He was positive of that.

  But that’s not what the transcript of the hear
ing said.

  The transcript showed Jordan asking the judge, “After the appropriate testimony at trial I’ll ask the court for a ruling submitting the issue to the jury.” Laura Stefone had left out only one word—before—but it was the crucial word. As the transcript read now, what Jordan had requested and the judge granted was simply that the issue should be submitted to the jury. That was one of Jordan’s options, but a stupid one. No lawyer with any sense ever let a jury hear evidence and then ask them to ignore that evidence if they decided it had been obtained illegally. Jurors never bothered with legal distinctions like that. They didn’t put things out of their minds once they had heard them. Jordan knew that. He would never have said what the transcript had him saying.

  It could have been an honest mistake. It was, after all, one word; the court reporter could have missed hearing it. But Jordan didn’t think so. In every instance where his memory disagreed with the written record, Laura Stefone’s record put Jordan and his client in a subtly worse position than they would have been in had the record agreed with Jordan’s memory. In fact, the subtlety of the alterations amazed Jordan. They showed a keen grasp of criminal law. Mike Arriendez had not been Jordan’s only opposing legal counsel in the Green Hills courtroom nor, perhaps, the best one.

  He wondered briefly why the court reporter had tipped her hand so early but then realized she couldn’t help it. Hers was going to be the official record of the legal proceedings against Wayne Orkney. She couldn’t give Jordan one version of a transcript now and then change it before the case went up on appeal. That would give him some basis for challeng­ing her record. As it was, there was no way he could. Laura Stefone, he remembered, hadn’t used a tape recorder. Any challenge would just be Jordan’s memory against Ms. Stefone’s, and the person resolving that conflict would be the trial judge: Judge Waverly.

  The result of this record was that Jordan’s motion to sup­press evidence was lost. So the statements Wayne had made after his arrest would come into evidence at trial. He had to think how to incorporate them into his defense.

  But that wasn’t his immediate problem. As Jordan reread the transcript, seeing himself appear even more buffoonish than he’d actually been, his hand tightened on the pages. He tore one corner as he turned the page. At the end he sat red faced, listening to his own breathing.

  So the hicks from Hicksville

  wanted to play hardball, did they?

  5

  You might as well sit here inside the bar.”

  Jordan touched the lady’s arm as he guided her inside the railing of Judge Waverly’s courtroom. Mrs. Chambers wore a short-sleeved, knee-length dress of navy blue with white polka dots; not gaudy, but not designed to make her incon­spicuous either. She was a very pleasant lady, he knew from past experience, with strong opinions and funny stories, but inside the courtroom, her demeanor was blank-faced. She took one of the chairs just inside the railing and began set­ting up.

  District attorney Mike Arriendez had been leaning casu­ally against the State’s counsel table. He stood straight to peer over Jordan’s shoulder at Mrs. Chambers. “Who’s this?”

  “My bodyguard,” Jordan said, sat down, removed papers from his briefcase, and folded his hands, placidly watching the judge’s empty bench.

  Other court staffers drifted in one by one. Each glanced boredly at Jordan, then looked past him and took in Mrs. Chambers, frowned, and went to confer among themselves. Arriendez joined them. The clerk, Cindy Garcia, left the courtroom. Laura Stefone took her place at her own table and began loading her stenography machine with paper, all the while glaring at Jordan and his cohort. When she was done, she sat stiffly, staring at the side wall of the courtroom.

  By the time Judge Waverly entered, Jordan was deep in whispered consultation with his client. Jordan and Wayne were the first ones on their feet when the judge took the bench. Judge Waverly had obviously already been alerted to the presence of the intruder. He looked at Mrs. Chambers blankly, then frowned at Jordan.

  “What is this?” he asked sternly.

  Jordan again rose to his feet, this time slowly, as if he weren’t sure he was the one being addressed. “Your Honor, my case hasn’t been called, so I don’t know if it’s proper, under your local rules, for me to address the court.”

  When he spoke, Laura Stefone’s hands moved briskly. So did Mrs. Chambers’ on the keys of her own machine.

  Judge Waverly’s black eyes bored into Jordan, through Jordan’s bland expression and innocent eyes, into the dark, squishy interior of the lawyer’s brain, where evil schemes were hatched.

  “This is the State of Texas versus Wayne Truman Ork­ney,” Judge Waverly intoned. “Now, Mr. Marshall, what is going on?”

  “This is Mrs. Chambers, Your Honor, a court reporter I’ve retained at my own expense, on loan from the 187th District Court of Bexar County.”

  “To what end? I’m sure you’ve noticed, Mr. Marshall, that this court has its own official court reporter.”

  “Mrs. Chambers is here to ensure the accuracy of the record, Your Honor.” Because the record for appeal is very important to me, the judge could easily read in Jordan’s ex­pression, since it’s perfectly obvious my client isn’t going to obtain justice here in the trial court.

  “Some people might admire your caution, Mr. Marshall, but it is a waste of this lady’s time and your money. This court will have an official written record, therefore”—the judge was speaking more slowly than usual, glancing at Mrs. Chambers, whose fingers moved in rhythm with his voice— “your record will be redundant Any discrepancies between the two records will be resolved by the trial court.”

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to. Of course if it became a matter of dueling records, Judge Waverly would decide in favor of his own loyal court reporter. Laura Stefone was being fairly successful at keeping her expression neutral, but Jordan thought he saw a look of satisfaction flit across her face.

  “And that ruling won’t be overturned on appeal,” Jordan said smoothly, “unless the appellate court decides the trial judge abused his discretion. The only way they could decide that is if the objective evidence”—he indicated the small tape recorder sitting on the corner of the defense table, its tape turning—“compellingly refutes the trial court’s decision.”

  Judge Waverly sat silent for a minute, studying Jordan, who looked back innocently. “Approach the bench,” the judge said. “Not you, young lady.”

  Jordan nodded to Mrs. Chambers. He picked up the tape recorder and took it forward with him, drawing another frown from the judge, who leaned forward and spoke more softly.

  “This is an insult to the court.”

  “It’s not intended that way, Your Honor.”

  “Then it’s an insult to my staff.”

  “Not at all, Your Honor.” Jordan and Laura Stefone were watching each other. Her hands seemed detached, going about their business in apparent neutral efficiency beneath the penetrating stare of her icy green eyes. “It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of court records, and I think the court reporter’s is the most difficult job in the courtroom. Am I speaking slowly enough for you? I know how garbled the record can be,” Jordan continued. “That’s why all the court reporters I've ever seen use a tape recorder to aid their memories in case something isn’t clear to them on first hearing. I noticed that your court reporter doesn’t use one, Your Honor, and I mean no disrespect to her at all, but I also have no idea of Ms. Stefone’s competence, and this record is very impor­tant to my client. So I brought my own back-up court re­porter to assist the court in the preparation of the record.”

  The judge turned to his own court reporter. “Ms. Stefone, do you feel you require assistance to record testimony?”

  “No, Your Honor.” Her fingers moved, recording her own words.

  “Your offer of backup will not be at all necessary, Mr. Marshall. As I don’t like my courtroom any more crowded than absolutely necessary, I’ll thank you to dismiss your Mrs. Chambers. Or I will
be forced to hold you both in contempt.”

  His words were as stem as ever, but there was something new in Judge Waverly’s tone. At least Jordan heard a subtle plea for compromise. And the judge was no longer staring into Jordan as if his stare were a weapon. He was study­ing him.

  After a long moment Jordan said, “Very well, Your Honor.” He turned and with a slight bow offered his tape recorder, its reel still revolving, to Laura Stefone. The court reporter opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a small recorder of her own. She flipped up its cover, glanced at the tape, and pushed the Record button. She set her own tape recorder on a corner of her desk and she and Jordan traded enigmatic looks.

  “Testing, testing,” Jordan said in the direction of the tape recorder and carried his own back to his counsel table. In a few whispered words he dismissed Mrs. Chambers, who calmly packed her equipment and withdrew without having spoken a word to anyone.

  “Now if we may proceed?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Earlier this week I had mailed the court and the district attorney a motion for change of venue and informed Mr. Arriendez by phone that I would be call­ing it to the court’s attention this morning. This being a Thursday, I’m prepared to present evidence on that motion.”

  Jordan sat. The judge blinked. “Mr. Arriendez, are you prepared on the defendant’s motion?”

  “Yes, sir, Your Honor.”

  “Very well. Call your first witness, Mr. Marshall.”

  “The defense calls Rachel Lopez, Your Honor.”

  The hearing was unlike any Jordan could recall. It was his first change of venue hearing as a defense lawyer, but that didn’t account for the difference. The difference was Laura Stefone. Jordan was no longer concerned about the record after his challenge and with two tape recorders spin­ning slowly. But the court reporter had injected herself into his attention. He not only chose his words more carefully, he watched Ms. Stefone for reaction. Jordan was accustomed to the flicker of eyes between lawyers in a courtroom or between lawyer and judge when one knows the other has scored a point But in this hearing Jordan watched the court reporter as well. If he hoped for an occasional nod or ex­pression of approval, it was a childish hope that deserved to fail. What he did see was Laura Stefone glance at him occasionally, following his words with her eyes as well as her fingers, an interest she had not shown him in previous hearings.