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

by Clifford Irving

"And you know what ours is," Douglas murmured.

  "Just tell me about Quintana in your own choice words."

  That they would do. Thiel repeated the story of the arrest, which was much as Hector had told it. The clerk in the Circle K had pushed a button with his foot. An alarm had flashed in the nearest police station. The next day Ballistics had called Homicide to tell them that the caliber and rifling in the barrel of Hector's gun matched the bullet that had been found in Dan Ho Trunh's brain. Since Thiel and Douglas were the detectives who had made the crime scene at the Trunh murder, Hector had been brought over to their office in Homicide and read his rights a second time.

  "He was sitting right where you're sitting now, counselor," Douglas said. Meaning, we wish it was you.

  "And did he look at your smiling face and say, 'I did it, I confess'?"

  Thiel laughed shrilly.

  "Did he ask for a lawyer?"

  "Too fuckin' dumb to do that," Douglas said. "Just sat there and babbled, 'I doan know what you talkin' about.' "

  "You ask him where he got the gun?"

  Thiel stroked his jowls. "He had some story, I can't remember what it was."

  "Did he say he found it in a Dumpster?"

  "That was it."

  "Any other prints on the gun?"

  "Smudges."

  "Y'all examine the car where the victim's body was found?" Warren asked.

  "Nothing in it. Nancy said to give you a set of photographs." Thiel slid open a file drawer and plucked out a manila folder.

  "What about the crime scene unit?" That was the special unit that went over every homicide site with vacuum and tweezers, and dug under the victim's fingernails.

  "Zilch." Thiel slid the folder across the desk. "The victim was shot in his car through an open window on the driver's side. Ballistics says maybe five, six feet. Your guy must've just reached in and took the wallet after he wasted him."

  Warren glanced down at his notes. "By the way, who drove the car away from the crime scene? It was a Ford wagon, right?"

  "I did," Douglas muttered.

  "You sideswipe any lampposts going back to the HPD garage?"

  "Hey, I already had this out with the gook's old lady." Douglas unclipped the manila folder and spilled the color 8 x 10s out on the desktop. Under the bone-white glare of fluorescent light that flooded down from the ceiling, Warren stared at a slumped body on the car seat, the face masked by blood.

  "This one," Douglas said, tapping a photograph he slid from the pile. "See it? That fuckin' bumper was ripped up when we got there. I told her that." He laughed hoarsely. "You going into civil law, counselor? Represent the victim's wife and sue the poh-lice for vee-hicular damage?"

  "Thanks, guys." Warren stood up, shaking out creases in his seersucker jacket. He put the photograph file into his briefcase. "Tommy Ruiz in the shop?"

  Ruiz was the homicide sergeant who had arrested Johnnie Faye Boudreau on the night of Clyde Ott's murder. He had to be dealt with too.

  "I think so," Thiel said. "Let me buzz."

  Tar on the pavement was beginning to melt. Warren eased the BMW into the low-priced parking lot behind the jail on Austin Street, stuffing two one-dollar bills and a quarter into the slot that matched the number of his stall, hoping he would remember the number, which on several occasions had not been the case. But so far his car had never been towed. Small favors from an otherwise un-benevolent fate.

  Two silent bums strolled by on their way to the mission, a few blocks past the courthouse and the complex of modern office buildings. The midday Gulf Coast heat surged violently down on Warren's bare head. He unknotted his tie.

  Another image intruded, cast down by the afternoon sun. He was back in Mexico, that week with Charm. They were walking through the mountains to a rock pool. Crouched down in a field of violet wildflowers, Charm had dropped her pants to pee. He had screwed on the telephoto lens to snap a photograph. She threw an arm across her face and shook the other fist in indignation. Warren was laughing.

  Ten minutes later he again sat opposite Hector Quintana in one of the visitor's cubicles at the jail. The sweat was drying on Warren's forehead and his back was cold where the air-conditioning blew on the damp patches.

  "Hector, we have to make a decision. And certain things have to be said."

  "What more can I tell you?" Quintana asked, glowering.

  "It's what I can tell you. The D.A.'s made you an offer."

  "Who is the D.A.?"

  "The D.A. is a guy you'll never meet — he just makes policy. I'm talking about an assistant district attorney, Nancy Goodpaster, whom you will definitely meet and probably grow to hate. She wants to put you in jail for life or get the State of Texas to inject you with cyanide. That's her job. And she thinks she's got a good case. Problem is, in that respect I agree with her."

  Quintana took some harsh breaths. Warren raised his hand to forestall what he thought was coming.

  "I'm trying to be objective. That's part of my job. But it's not quite so bad as I'm painting it. Relax."

  Quintana's breathing eased a little but not much.

  "The courts are crowded. So Nancy Goodpaster is willing to compromise. She'll reduce the charge from capital murder to plain murder. She's offered you forty years."

  Softly, Quintana repeated the number.

  "I know forty years sounds like a lot," Warren said, seeing the man's horror in his brown eyes, feeling a small part of it begin to take root in his own heart. This was the nasty part, bargaining away the consecutive seasons of a man's life. Maybe you could get used to it, but you could never learn to like it.

  "And it is a lot," he went on, "although with time off for good behavior you'll do only half of whatever they give you. But I want to point something out to you. You can't do half of death."

  Quintana groaned.

  "I know, Hector. I know. You say you're innocent. I might be able to get them to offer less than forty. Maybe thirty-five, but I can't make any promises on that. And the decision is yours."

  Quintana clenched his fists.

  "Let me ask you something," Warren said. "And think before you answer. You've been here a couple of weeks now. You like the life?"

  After he had thought about it, Quintana replied, "I have a couple of friends. Other Mexican guys."

  "That's good. You'll make more. Some you can trust, some you can't. But try to answer my question. Do you like the life?"

  Warren knew that prison could become a normal existence. Jailing, the cons called it. Three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, a TV to watch. No rent to pay, no worry about meeting the bills. You could read, take correspondence courses, and once they sent you up to TDC at Huntsville you could laze around in the sunshine, play ball, lift weights, run around the track. With the right connections you could get booze and dope. You couldn't have a woman but a lot of men secretly or not-so-secretly didn't mind: they'd had far more heartbreak than joy from the women in their lives. You had a job to help pass the time — making furniture or license plates, washing dishes. If you were fired, there was always another job waiting. No one to yell at you that you'd fucked up, because you had fucked up, that was a given, but so had everyone else around you. Some thrived on jailing or at least accepted it as a solution to an otherwise unsatisfactory existence. Some did life on the installment plan. A few years ago a client of Warren's had got out of Huntsville after completing five years on a ten-year bank robbery bit. He had taken the bus to the town of Bryan thirty miles away, walked into the First National Bank of Bryan and held it up with his fist stuffed inside a paper bag to simulate a gun. He never made it out of the bank. In a few weeks he was back in Huntsville. Warren asked why he had done it. He said, "I got scared. I wanted to go home."

  Now Warren waited for an answer to his question.

  "No," Quintana said. "I doan like it here. I want to go back to El Palmito."

  "That may not happen, Hector."

  Quintana quietly began to cry.

  Warren coolly tried t
o figure out why. There were several possibilities. Because Hector missed his Francisca, because he'd killed a man and now had to pay the price, or because he hadn't killed a man and this process was beyond comprehension. Any one of those or a combination would do. You poor son of a bitch.

  "Forty years…" Quintana murmured. "Twenty, you said, if I behave."

  Numbers for me, Warren thought. Years for him. Three hundred and sixty-five days and nights to each one.

  "What should I do, Mr. Blackburn?"

  "Don't dump that on me, Hector. You've got to tell me."

  "Mr. Blackburn, listen to me. I doan ask you about the evidence. You tell me all that, and I think I understand. I ask you if you believe I killed this man I never even know. In El Palmito I have trouble killing even a pig. People laugh at me, think I'm foolish. Do you think I did such a thing as kill a human being who never harm me, never speak a word to me?"

  Warren looked into Quintana's liquid eyes. There was no fright there and suddenly no desperation. There was only yearning and a simple plea. A feeling welled up from somewhere in the most profound part of Warren, and it touched his heart, which gave a lurch for this man. He had never had a feeling like this before. He had felt sorry for Virgil Freer — for Hector Quintana he felt a different emotion. He couldn't explain it. Maybe to Charm, but to no one else. It was a feeling akin to love. If you loved someone, you believed them. You trusted them. However irrational, in that moment the feeling seemed indisputable.

  Pedro had said that Hector didn't own a pistol, had no money to buy one. Words with the ring of truth. Pedro hadn't known that Hector had been arrested; hadn't had time, before Warren's appearance at the stables, to rationalize and figure out a way to help his amigo if the opportunity arose. Res gestae, the law said — words spoken in the unguarded heat of the moment. Lawyers learned to trust such words. In trial they were exempt from the hearsay rule: you could quote them if you were on the witness stand.

  As for Siva Singh, Warren saw her as a sincere woman who believed in law and order and wanted to help the police. Eyewitnesses were always so sure of what they had seen. Once they had committed themselves to a story, they had a vested interest in keeping to it. Most eyewitnesses don't have time to tell red from green or short from tall. They make it up later, without realizing it.

  Everyone seemed to know that except juries.

  Hector's story was a simple one. He never deviated, never contradicted, never blushed except when talking about the Safeway shopping cart. Maybe that was true too, maybe he'd found it somewhere, knew he should return it to the supermarket but hadn't done so, and was ashamed. I believe him. This is not a man who would kill.

  Warren linked his fingers together behind his head, leaned back and cracked the vertebrae of his spine. This was crazy. He had an understanding with Lou Parker. He had the Boudreau trial looming. The most important trial of his life. If he could win with Scoot, if he could impress Scoot, he would be more than back on track. But he couldn't back away from Hector Quintana. He would have been ashamed.

  He had gambled on Virgil Freer and lost. Maybe life owed him one. Or maybe not; maybe he was making the same mistake all over again. The thought was terrifying.

  But with a stubborn rush of certainty, he thrust it away. He was not the same man he had been four years ago.

  "No, Hector, I don't believe you did it."

  "You don't?"

  There were fresh tears in Hector's eyes. From pain or joy, Warren didn't know.

  "No, I really don't. I would never lie to you."

  "Then why should I go to prison for twenty years?"

  "I can't think of a single fucking reason," Warren said.

  Hector nodded slowly.

  Warren's cheeks grew flushed. "Now listen to me. I'm going to break the rules, I'm going to tell you what I would do if I were in your shoes. If I were innocent — I mean, if I weren't bullshitting my lawyer and hoping for a miracle that will never happen — I'd pray a lot, and I'd go to trial. If I were really innocent. But it's your life, not mine. The odds against you are big. Gigantic. Stupendous. Their case looks airtight. I'm not pushing you one inch in any direction. I'm just telling you how I feel."

  "All right." Quintana spoke softly.

  "All right what?"

  "I go to trial."

  "You want to do that? Take the chance?"

  "Yes."

  "You understand what happens if you lose?"

  "Yes. They will kill me, put me to sleep. Maybe that's not so bad as twenty years in prison. I don't know. I don't care. I am innocent."

  A nothing case, it'll go fast. What the hell am I doing? Tinkering with another man's life and death? But you can't plead a man guilty and take twenty whole years out of his life, not if he says he's innocent and you believe him. That's not what being a lawyer means. It's not what being a human being means. The feeling of certainty that Quintana was innocent moved through him again. If I believe that, Warren thought, I have less choice than he does. And if they kill him I'll have to live with it longer than he will.

  There was no way to shake hands through the mesh or the slot at the bottom of it for the passage of documents. Warren pressed his palm against the cool metal. Quintana pressed back.

  Warren gathered up his papers. "I'll do what I can," he promised. "We'll give these bastards a run for their money. But for God's sake, if you change your mind, let me know."

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Judge Parker ordered Warren into her chambers after he had spoken to Nancy Goodpaster. Goodpaster looked unhappy. She said to Warren, "I think you're making a mistake. You and Quintana both."

  Once again Warren remembered his youthful vision: the law as protector, lawyers as the standard-bearers of decency and fairness. And he remembered Hector saying, "I don't know. I don't care. I am innocent."

  He sat on the couch in front of the bookcase full of Harvard Classics, facing the judge's desk. The full strength of the afternoon sun burned through the windows behind him onto his neck. On the desk, behind a Tibetan statuette of a horse, was the bronze plaque that Rick had mentioned, invoking guidance from the deity and promising Her indulgence. Warren hadn't seen it before now. He wondered if the judge set it out there only for special occasions.

  Lou Parker pinched her cigarette between her thumb and index finger and pointed it at him as if it were a dart she was about to throw. Right between his eyes.

  "Let me get this straight, Mr. Blackburn. Less than a week ago you asked the prosecutor if she'd cut a deal with you."

  "That's correct, your honor."

  "Nancy agreed to forty years. That was a pretty good deal."

  "But my client won't go for it, your honor."

  "If a guy comes to me for sentencing on a capital, I drop fifty to sixty on him."

  If you're in a good mood, Warren thought.

  "My client is a stubborn man," he said. "He says he's innocent. And I happen to believe him."

  Parker rasped, "Then you're a fool. My memory is that you and I sat right here one day not so long ago and got our signals straight. I'm not supposed to know the facts of a case until it comes to trial, but I ain't deaf or blind. I told you this was a whale in the barrel for the prosecution. I told you to plead this guy out and not waste my court time. You think I've forgotten? You do this to me, and I promise you'll never get an appointment in my court again."

  "So let Nancy take her best shot," Warren said, ignoring the threat. "What difference does it make if my client insists on going to trial?"

  Parker raised her voice: "I'll tell you what difference it makes. You're supposed to represent this man's best interests. If he pleads not guilty and doesn't stand a chance to win, and you've got an offer on the table that will save his miserable life, you've got a responsibility to try and talk him into taking that offer. Even if you think he's innocent! That's elementary, but I have a bad feeling in my colon that certain elementary things may escape you from time to time, like they did once before."

  Warren fr
owned, drumming his fingers nervously on the arm of the couch. The barb had drawn blood.

  The judge leaned forward, like a hound pointed toward a quarry. "Have you talked straight with this man Quintana?"

  "I did my best," Warren said, wondering if that was true.

  "How come I don't quite believe you? How come I think you're aiming to use up two valuable weeks of my courtroom time playing to the crowd? And picking up a fat fee for every day you're in court?"

  "I don't know, your honor," Warren said, letting his annoyance show. The back of his neck felt toasted from the sun slanting through the window. "Why don't you tell me how come?"

  "Don't sass me, counselor!"

  "Then, Judge Parker, don't question my doing what I think is best for my client, whom you never met, and who, I remind you, claims he's innocent."

  "And don't they all," said Parker, "until you give them the facts of life. We're not talking about shock probation or ninety-day jail therapy here. We're talking about a needle in the arm. Buenas noches, José."

  "He knows all that."

  In the face of his firmness, her exasperation ripened. Her face grew florid. "Just how do you plan to benefit, counselor? You won't work in my court again. This case isn't going to make any headlines — this is a dumbshit ignorant wetback supposed to have blown away a Vietnamese handyman. So what's on your so-called mind? How do you justify this farce?"

  There was a quality to her voice, Warren thought, that would have made a rake scraping across a concrete sidewalk sound appealing. His back muscles tensed. His fingers kept drumming and he tapped one shoe steadily on the carpet. Quintana's defense would be flimsy even in a fair trial with a dispassionate judge. Now that he had pissed Parker off to this extent, the concept of dispassionate judicial rulings seemed about as likely as the chance of snow on the day of trial.

  And I might be wrong, Warren thought. Jesus, I might be wrong again. I can't afford that. That won't just kill my career, it will kill all the faith I ever had.

  He felt a growing dismay but he knew he would not, could not, budge. When she realized he had no intention of answering her, Judge Parker clenched her teeth and snatched her court calendar. She leafed through it rapidly, then turned to Nancy Goodpaster.