Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller

by Clifford Irving

"Then maybe I can help you." She propelled him toward the parking lot.

  In the Astrodome Sports Bar, over their third round of bourbon on the rocks, Johnnie Faye laid a hand on his arm.

  "Good lawyer buddy, are you ready to listen?" Nearly midnight after a hard day, and Warren nodded wearily.

  "No matter what she tells you to the contrary, what a woman wants in a man is for him to take command. I personally never found one I'd let boss me around for more than five minutes, but I certainly don't give up trying. Maybe, like you say, your wife loves you. I like to think that's true — you're a good-looking fellow, and you're intelligent, and you've got what I call quality. But your little wife is confused. Life's confusing enough and people don't make it any clearer the way they carry on. Aside from life, you're the main reason for her confusion, not this other dude. Why? Because you ain't been in command! That's what it's all about, believe me. So you got to set up now and growl. Not like a puppy dog. You ever watch those National Geographic specials? I love 'em. You see these lions over there in Africa, and the females go out and do the killing so they can all eat, and then the male lion comes up and lets out a growl — grrrr — soft, but believe me, they get the message, and they all back off so he can dive in and get the best cut of dinner. But he's got to growl first, to let 'em know he's still king of the beasts. You get all doe-eyed and sad, your wife'll feel sorry for you a while, but sooner or later she'll say, 'Don't cry on me, Warren baby, you might rust my spurs.' Got to give her a little sweetness too, but mostly you got to give her the feeling that you're in charge, just like you'd do in the jungle or in a courtroom. Understand? The good Lord is like a judge, sittin' high up there, and the good Lord hates a muddle the way a judge hates a hung jury. The good Lord says, 'Mr. Man, Mr. Lawyer, you can walk, you can run, or you can lie down, but don't ever wobble.'"

  Warren, drunk, listened to the parade of metaphor. Be a lion. Growl. Be a lawyer. Be in command. Please the good Lord, the biggest judge of all.

  Could you take marital advice from a woman who had possibly arranged to murder her lover's wife and the man who had done the killing for her, and then pulled the trigger on another lover?

  You probably could if you were drunk enough. And down enough. And feeling sorry for yourself.

  That last barb upset him. There were men and women sleeping in alleys, people in hospitals with I.V.s in their veins, kids starving over in Africa and overdosing right here and being stabbed with cigarettes in houses from coast to coast. And he was bleeding inside because a woman didn't love him anymore.

  But I'm inside this skin, and it's all I've got, and it hurts.

  "I have to go, Johnnie Faye," he said finally, throwing down some cash on the bar and rising from the wobbly stool. "I have work to do tomorrow."

  Warren arrived at the house of the late Dan Ho Trunh at nine o'clock in the morning, hung over from drinking in the Astrodome Sports Bar. Charm had been asleep when he got back home at 1 A.M. In the darkness he slid silently into the bed, keeping to his side, listening for a while to her steady, quiet breathing. She seemed at peace. All her words rushed back at him like blows. He crushed the edges of the pillow with his fingers and pain pressed against his eyelids. None of this is true. I'll wake up in the morning and it will all be gone.

  He was awakened by a polluting sadness. He dressed and went through his morning rituals and left the house without even looking at his wife.

  The Trunhs lived south of the Loop in Blueridge, on a street with small neat brick houses. A small Chevrolet was parked in the driveway and Warren peered inside. No gum wrappers on the floor, not even a smudge of dust on the dashboard.

  The house was immaculate too: brocade curtains, doilies on the kitchen table, lace patches on the arms of the living room chairs, photographs of dignified older Asian men and women on the wall above the TV. Dan Ho Trunh's tiny young widow and mother were dressed in black blouses and black jeans, and some kids played quietly in another room. Warren offered his business card and explained that he was the lawyer appointed by the State of Texas to defend the man accused of killing their husband and son.

  Not easy to say.

  They seemed to understand. The younger Mrs. Trunh, the widow, who looked to be about twenty-five, invited Warren to have a glass of grapefruit juice or a Diet Coke. Her dark eyes were grave but she kept smiling at him. How could they help?

  "By telling me everything that happened the night before Dan Ho left the house. And that morning too."

  They told him nothing he didn't know already, except which TV programs the family had watched.

  He focused on the widow, who spoke better English than her mother-in-law. "You stated to the police that your husband was carrying his wallet that day. Did you see him pick up his wallet when he left home, Mrs. Trunh?"

  "No, but he always carried it. His money and many different cards were in it."

  "Credit cards?"

  Mrs. Trunh shook her head. No credit cards. He paid by cash and check.

  Warren said, "I'm terribly sorry to impose this way. I know how you both must feel."

  The two Mrs. Trunhs nodded again with forgiveness.

  "How do you know that he had more than fifty dollars in the wallet that morning?"

  "He always did," the widow said.

  "Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs. Trunh? Anyone who had a grudge against him?"

  The widow said no.

  Warren swallowed the rest of his grapefruit juice and asked questions about the family and Dan Ho's friends. Seventy percent of homicides were committed by friends or family of the victim.

  Everyone liked Dan Ho. No one had ever threatened him.

  This was going nowhere but downhill. Warren scratched his head. He asked if the police still had the car her husband drove that night. No, the widow said, it had been returned. It was in the garage out in back.

  "May I see it?"

  The women in their matching mourning jeans led him through the kitchen into the garage, where tools and paints were stacked neatly on plywood shelves. The old blue Fairlane wagon looked as if it had been recently washed and waxed; the paintwork, a particularly garish shade of blue, gleamed in the shadows. Warren opened the driver's door. Heat poured out. The inside had been vacuumed — it was as neat as the Chevy in the driveway. If there had been bloodstains, there were none now.

  His mind wandered. In the heat of the garage he remembered the first time he had kissed Charm in the front seat of his old Trans Am. How the kiss had gone on and on until he had floated off into another world, and how later, at least once a year, she'd said wistfully, "Will you ever kiss me like that again?"

  He opened the glove compartment. Empty, except for the registration and insurance papers held together by a paper clip. When he stepped behind the car to write down the license plate number on his legal pad, the women murmured in their soft language. He looked up and tried to smile reassuringly.

  "Lawyers write down a thousand things that are never of any use. Please don't worry."

  He saw that the right rear bumper had been torn away a few inches, and there was a cream-colored rip along the shiny blue metal in front of it. While he was looking at that, his mind elsewhere, the mother-in-law chattered more loudly. She seemed angry.

  "She is not angry at you," the widow said. "She is angry at the police for damaging the car."

  Warren asked what it was the police had done.

  "What you were just looking at. The bumper and that big scratch — they were not there when my husband left that morning. The police did that when they returned the car to us."

  "Oh," Warren said. The mother was still talking in Vietnamese, using her hands now to emphasize her point.

  The widow said, "Naturally they say, 'No, we didn't do that. It was there already.' And so it is we who must pay for it to be fixed. These things are very expensive."

  A man, a husband and son and father, was dead. It was amazing what people flew into a lather about.

  "Yes, they're r
idiculously expensive," Warren said, while out of habit he made a note on his legal pad about the damage.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  He drove from the Trunhs' to Hermann Park and the stables. Before he got out of the car he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves.

  Behind the shed where Hector Quintana had once lived, Warren found a blackened pot where someone had fried pork cracklings — in the afternoon sun you could smell the grease. A rolled-up rag of a plaid blanket lay on the earth. But there was no one around. A nearby dressage ring, with gates and fallen triple bars, was also deserted. The heat rolled over the ground in waves. A horse whinnied in the stables.

  Inside the stables the air was shadowed and pungent. He saw that a mare had been led from one of the stalls and tied to the cantle of an English saddle lying on some straw. Inside the empty stall a man shoveled horseshit into a bucket, splashing the dirt with water from another bucket.

  "Armando?"

  The man turned, wiping sweat from his forehead. He was thin and dark and wore baggy, stained trousers.

  "Armando is not here," the man said.

  "Then you must be Pedro."

  The man nodded. He was neither suspicious nor hopeful. He just looked tired.

  "So how y'all doin'?" Warren said. "Hard work — mucho trabajo, si?"

  "Not so much," Pedro said.

  "Well, you sure look worn out. And I'll bet you're hungrier'n a stray dog. You finish up, I'll buy you a bunch of chicken tacos and a beer. I'm a friend of Hector's."

  At the taco stand Warren brought the plastic plates back to his car, where he had left the motor running and the air-conditioning on. To his amazement — although as soon as he thought about it, it made sense — Pedro hadn't known that Hector was in jail. Hector had just vanished. Pedro and his friend Armando had shrugged. Maybe Hector would turn up, maybe he wouldn't.

  "Nobody from the D.A.'s office came to talk to you?"

  No one had come, Pedro said, layering the salsa deep into the taco. Warren couldn't do that — it would rip the top off his palate and leave his tongue numb.

  "Hector suppose' to have kill a man?" Pedro didn't stop chewing, but he shook his head strongly. "I doan believe that."

  "Neither do I, Pedro, but they say he did. With that pistola he carried around in his shopping cart."

  "He din' have no pistol," Pedro said, apparently surprised.

  "You never saw it?"

  "Saw what?"

  "The pistol Hector bought, or borrowed."

  "Never saw no pistol, I swear to you. Who he can borrow it from? We doan know anyone has a pistol."

  "When did you and Armando last see Hector?"

  On the day Hector had vanished, in the early afternoon. Pedro was positive.

  "Maybe he bought the pistol after he left you," Warren said.

  "He din' have no money for buy a pistol."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  "He borrow three dollars from me that day. I trust him — I borrow him before, he always pay back. I borrow from him too when I doan got nothing."

  "Would you get up in court and testify to all that?"

  Pedro looked unhappy.

  "I can't pay you to testify," Warren said, "that's against the law. But I can give you some money to eat for a few days. I can buy you some clothes." He slid two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, slipping them into Pedro's dirty shirt pocket. "You can't get hurt, not if you get up there and tell the truth. Do you understand what I'm saying? Hector's your amigo."

  With his fingers Pedro scooped up some chicken that had fallen out of the taco.

  "Pedro, if they find him guilty, they could kill him."

  "Shoot him? You got the firing squad?"

  "No, that's inhuman — those guys can miss and they gutshoot you. You hang a man, that knot can slip and he can strangle. Electric chair, he sizzles, been known to catch fire. Gas chamber, he pukes and yells. Texas is more modern. Here we drug a man, then inject cyanide into a vein. They say it doesn't hurt. No one's ever come back to say yea or nay."

  Pedro still said nothing. Warren realized he hadn't understood.

  "Look, you get up there in court, you talk, you leave. They won't kick you out of the country for having no papers, I promise you. If I can arrange that, will you do it?"

  "Okay," Pedro said. But it was not heartfelt.

  Warren drove the Mexican back to the stables, gave him one of his business cards, made sure it was tucked away in a pocket with the forty dollars, and let him out of the car.

  "Don't leave the city. Don't even leave Hermann Park without calling and letting me know where you are. You can call collect. Don't let me down, Pedro. Don't let Hector down! Viva Mexico!"

  Pedro nodded his head and then, as Warren drove away waving, waved back in that odd Latin way, with cupped fingers, as if he were beckoning.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Later in the afternoon Warren went to see Siva Singh at the dry cleaning establishment. The Indian lady politely informed him that the district attorney had told her not to speak to anyone about the case. Cute, Warren thought.

  "Nancy Goodpaster told you that? The woman prosecutor?"

  "Goodness me, sir, please don't be angry. I have her card right here." Taking off her glasses, she dipped into her pocketbook.

  "She has no right to tell you that, Ms. Singh," Warren explained. "I think you may have misunderstood her. You certainly have the right to talk to me. And if you want to be fair, you should."

  Singh still refused to talk to him. He put in a call to Goodpaster but couldn't reach her.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  He spent the next morning, a Wednesday, at Ravendale, knocking on doors of the apartment buildings near the west parking lot, which he judged to be the one where Hector had sat down in the darkness and made his decision to rob the Circle K.

  The few people who were home stared at him in astonishment. "In the Dumpster? Three weeks ago? Do I remember throwing out a half-empty bottle of Old Crow or a pair of tennis socks? Are you kidding me?"

  Warren offered his business card, so no one thought he was entirely a madman. But no one could remember seeing a man rummaging in the Dumpster or sitting in the parking lot. But not everyone had been home. People were out playing tennis or swimming or destroying their skin in the sun by the pool.

  In the main building Warren waited his turn behind two other people, then showed his card to a pretty woman at the reception desk. She wore a lapel tag that said "Janice." He asked her if they had a bulletin board where he might post a notice. No, Janice said, the bulletin board was strictly for tenant convenience.

  "Well, I wonder, ma'am, if I had a little flyer printed up, could you do me a favor and put a copy in everyone's letter box?"

  "Mail is delivered to the door."

  "What are those letter boxes for?"

  "Spare keys, bills and notices from the management. You can't put an advertisement in there."

  It wasn't an advertisement, Warren explained patiently. It was a request for information that might help a man perhaps falsely accused of a crime.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "and I'm busy." She turned away toward a desk.

  "Just a minute, Janice." Reluctantly, she swung around, and he said, "I'm an attorney, and my client faces the death penalty for something he says he didn't do. I realize this may be a hard day for you, but I need your help. If not, I'm sure I can find someone in this office who'll do what's proper and do it courteously as well."

  He hadn't raised his voice at all.

  "I'm so sorry," Janice said. "I have a terrible migraine headache. If you knew what goes on around here, you'd understand. You don't want to use the bulletin board — no one ever looks at it. If you bring me the flyer, I'll put it in the boxes."

  "Thank you, ma'am. I'll send a note to the management expressing my thanks for your kindness."

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  At HPD headquarters downtown on Reisner Street, Warren picked up a visitor's plastic I.D. card at t
he desk downstairs and then took the elevator up to Homicide on the third floor. After speaking that morning to Nancy Goodpaster, he had called Sergeants Hollis Thiel and Craig Douglas to find out when they were on duty. They were the arresting officers in the case and Thiel had filed the affidavit of complaint that the D.A.'s office had taken to the grand jury in order to secure the indictment. It read, in part: "… that Hector Quintana de Luna, on or about May 19, 1989, intentionally and knowingly caused the death of Dan Ho Trunh by shooting the Complainant with a gun, and committed the murder while in the course of committing a robbery, AGAINST THE PEACE AND DIGNITY OF THE STATE."

  The peace and dignity of the state. Fuck them both, Warren decided. They don't exist.

  Homicide overlooked a parking lot for blue-and-whites and a tangle of concrete freeway ramps. It had acoustic tile ceilings and government-metal furniture. Besides cigar smoke, Warren always believed he could smell a mix of old sweat and recent fear. If you weren't a cop, the faces that peered at you from the maze of glassed-in offices tended to be unfriendly. Maybe you hadn't murdered anyone yet, but you were probably thinking about it. You were certainly capable.

  Douglas was tall, in his thirties, and looked like a cadaver. Thiel looked like an older Porky Pig. Warren's private opinion was that Thiel was a bitter, honest, hardworking homicide detective, and Douglas was a lowlife mongrel who would lie on the witness stand to make himself look good and to secure a conviction. But both hated defense attorneys with equal vigor.

  "Goodpaster call you?" Warren asked.

  Thiel nodded. "She said we could tell you a few things."

  "She say anything about showing me the offense report?"

  "We can't do that," Douglas said. "Witnesses talk to us in confidence."

  Thiel said, "We'd like to, but we can't."

  Warren laughed with less than amusement. "Mutt and Jeff. You guys are some comedy act."

  "You lawyers come in here," Thiel said, "and expect us to roll out the fucking red carpet. And then we get up on the witness stand and y'all try to make us look like lying scumbags."

  Warren shrugged. "That's my job."