by Alfredo Vea
“There on the Persian rug in front of my man is the biggest cat he’s ever seen… and that was just the cub! He lifts his flashlight a little higher, and behind the cub is a huge pair of crimson eyes, as big as the taillights on a Harley. The owner of those eyes is a four-hundred-pound Bengal tiger!”
A groan of believing disbelief went up around him as he continued. On noticing that the cooks in the kitchen were smoking, Newton lit a cigarette for himself.
“So here’s my homeboy staring at this enormous cat! She’s sitting on the rug with a whole bloody sheep’s leg in her mouth. Now he knows why there’s all that butcher paper in the back! By now, he’s so fucking scared that all of his tattoos are sliding off his body. There are ink stains on the carpet. His stomach lining is turning into menudo, and he is so petrified that he doesn’t even hear the cub crying. It seems my boy had his right foot planted right on the cub’s tail.”
“Oh my God!” someone moaned.
“The supplemental report said that the cops located my client in a Dumpster across the street by following a clear trail of feces and urine, not to mention blood. The mother cat had torn off most of his right leg… and the all-important middle finger of his right hand. Seven cops and a paramedic couldn’t pull him out of that Dumpster. They had to send one cop over to a rest home near Park Merced. They dragged my boy’s dear, sweet mother away from her bingo game and drove her to the scene of the crime. It took her twenty minutes to talk him out of that garbage can. ‘Antonio, mijo,el tigre, ya se fue.’”
The table was quaking with sardonic giggles, tragic guffaws, sympathetic wails.
“Out of ten fingers, the tiger eats that one. His primary means of self-expression had been chewed off and swallowed. It would be like one of us losing our voice. When I went to see him at the hospital, he only had two things to say: ‘Hey man, you a lawyer, tell me, ain’t tigers illegal? Ain’t they against the law?’ After I recovered from my disbelief, my client begged me to ask the owner of the tiger to look around the house for his high school ring.”
Another burst of laughter filled the House of Toast, as this particular eating establishment was unofficially named. Like all such places in government buildings, the contract to serve sumptuous and appetizing food had gone to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder—a petulant, brooding group of smoking Vietnamese cooks—did not look up from their tedious work. They had grown accustomed to the incomprehensible banter of these coffee-swilling lawyers. Though most of the cooks had learned to speak some English, the dialect these lawyers were speaking seemed totally alien.
Back home, in a South Vietnam that no longer existed, there were lots of police and lots of prosecutors, but no such thing as defense lawyers. One of the cooks wiped the sweat from his brow and sneered at the circle of men in suits and shirtsleeves. Back home any decent person would rather cross the street than walk on the same sidewalk with a lawyer.
“That was Antonio Ruiz, wasn’t it?” said Matt Gonzalez, the Te jano lawyer. “I represented him over at San Quentin.”
“Señor Antonio ‘El Tigre’ Ruiz to be exact,” said Jesse Pasadoble, a Chicano lawyer who was a veteran of the Vietnam War and of almost two hundred felony trials. “He renamed himself after that case and became a minor celebrity in the jails. You should have seen him at his sentencing. There he was, on crutches, flipping the judge the bird with that phantom middle finger of his. The judge cited him for attempted contempt of court. Of course we argued both legal and factual impossibility, but the judge thought the intent to flip the bird was sufficient. Why were you representing him in custody?” Jesse asked, turning to Matt.
“He got caught burglarizing the cells of his fellow inmates! They caught him by using the state of the art in forensic science and crime-scene detection. It seems the cells at San Quentin are pretty dusty and the thief left a series of shoe prints—all of a left shoe.”
“At least he’s consistent,” said one laughing voice. “How does he describe himself these days, as a cat burglar?”
“He told me,” said Matt, “that he wasn’t scared of getting caught burglarizing in the pen. After that damn tiger, those guys in the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia looked like a bunch of sissies. El Tigre is back on the streets, you know. Some Mexican lawyer got all of his priors stricken and worked out a great deal.”
He winked at Jesse, who smiled back.
“I saw him not too long ago. You won’t believe it! He went and bought himself a used prosthetic limb. Only problem is that it’s another left leg! At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I was talking to him for a few minutes, and I kept trying to clear my head, before I realized he was wearing two left shoes! Poor bastard. If you tell him to move to the right, he’s paralyzed!”
Matt laughed deeply at the memory, then gathered himself for his own contribution to the contest.
“But my dear, dear friends, I’ve got one even better than my man Antonio Ruiz,” he announced with a look of perverse expectation and masochistic glee dancing in his eyes. His arms were upraised in ministerial dignity, and his fingers were spread to signify the importance of what he was about to reveal. He paused for a long moment to heighten the suspense. The Right Reverend Gonzalez was about to testify before his congregation of peers. Surely he was about to relate the defense lawyer’s worst nightmare come true.
“I, Matt Gonzalez, was doin’ a rape trial a couple of years ago in front of old Judge Garfield. Do you remember him?”
“Yeah,” said a disapproving voice. “The old geezer with the inflatable doughnut pillow for his hemorrhoids and the stack of girlie magazines in the bottom drawer?”
“Yeah, I remember him, too,” said Jesse with a scathing, sarcastic tone. “Did you know that his clerk had this electric switch hidden under her desk that she would flip on whenever an objection was being lodged?”
One or two at the table knew of the secret switch. The rest had looks on their faces that spanned the full range of human emotion.
“That switch activated a strong electric vibrator under His Honor’s seat that would shake him awake, and he would jerk bolt upright and shout at the top of his lungs, ‘The motion is denied with prejudice! The objection is overruled!’
“The last time I tried a case in his court, one of the jurors had a heart attack right there in the jury box. God, it was something! It was pandemonium. The bailiffs were screaming into their walkie-talkies and running into each other. A nurse who had been on the jury panel was performing CPR right below the witness stand. The court clerk was pushing that switch so hard that it was lifting her desk clear off the floor, and the judge was rubbing the sand from his eyes and screaming, ‘Defense motion denied, defense motion denied!’ ”
“That’s my man,” said Matt, with a wide grin. “Last time he read the Evidence Code, it was written in cuneiform. Come to think of it, I think his girlie magazines were Sumerian. Good-looking women, those Sumerians. They all have such beautiful eyes. Anyway, here I’m doin’ this rape trial and the victim is up on the stand. I’d just finished cross-examining her, and the prosecutor was up doing his paint-by-numbers redirect. Even after being prompted by the DA, the victim, bless her soul, had just admitted on cross that she could not really identify her assailant.”
There was a gasp of disbelief at the table. Most victims simply identified as their assailant whoever was sitting next to counsel at the defense table. On several occasions victims have been known to choose the attorney as their attacker when the defendant happened to be dressed in a better suit than his lawyer’s. An honest victim is as rare as an honest defendant.
“She had told my investigator the same thing months earlier. She had never seen her attacker’s face. She had real courage, that lady. Well, I didn’t really have any more questions for her beyond that. They had no fingerprints and no other eyewitnesses. After her identification fell apart, the prosecutor’s case was purely circumstantial and with no direct connection to my boy. A few hours after the crime was committ
ed, my client was arrested down in the Tenderloin, near Leavenworth and Hyde Streets, with some of her credit cards in his possession. He had tried to use an automatic teller machine.”
“He found them,” Newton intoned convincingly.
“He bought them from the perpetrator,” said Chris Gauger, a new arrival at the table.
“Exactly,” said Matt. “Even though I believed it was a thin, circumstantial case, I could still sense that the jury wanted to convict somebody. You know what I’m talking about.”
Everyone knew what he was talking about.
“Anyway, the poor woman felt so filthy and violated after the rape that she douched and showered almost immediately afterward. Of course there was no semen to test. They just couldn’t make my boy with the evidence they had. Even with all of that jury sentiment, he was as good as free. His black ass was already out the door.
“So after the witness failed to identify the perpetrator, the prosecutor was sweating bullets in front of the jury box and just dying on his redirect examination. The jury wasn’t buying any of what he had to sell. But then, all of a sudden, my client started elbowing me and screaming at me, ‘Ask her if he had a scar on his ass! Ask her if he had a scar on his ass!’ ”
There was a knowing groan around the table. Eyes closed in pain and arms were upraised in despair. Each two and three-piece suit around the table was turning slowly to rags and sackcloth.
“I told him to sit down and shut up, but he persisted. The toothless sumbitch was screaming his demand directly into my right ear. I tried to quiet him up, but every person on the jury heard it. I swear his breath was so bad that I’ve had straight hair ever since.” He raised his eyebrows as he looked up toward his own brown, once curly head of hair.
“He kept getting louder and louder, insisting that his stupid question be asked. Finally, in desperation, I stood up and moved for a recess. The clerk hit her secret switch; the judge jerked upright, blinked twice, denied my motion with prejudice, and promptly suggested that we take a recess. I sat my man down in the holding cell and tried to explain, but it was useless.”
Every cup of coffee at the table was being allowed to go cold. Here, in all of its glory, was irony.
“I pleaded—I begged the damn fool to let me run my case. I even promised to show him my diploma from Georgetown School of Law. I think some three-time loser must have planted the crazy question in his head while they were together in the weight room. Despite my firm assurances about the state of the case, my client insisted that I ask that damned question.”
“Jailhouse lawyers,” Newton grunted. “It kills me that the biggest losers are always the ones handing out the most advice.”
“So I made my record in chambers, and I moved for a directed verdict of acquittal based on a clear failure of the evidence, but the judge pointed out that all of the evidence had not been heard yet,” continued Matt. “Old Judge Garfield woke up long enough to rule that the defendant had a right to have his question asked, even if it was against the advice of counsel. When I personally refused to ask the question, the judge sneered through his yellow dentures and informed my client that he himself could put the question to the witness.”
“That was kind of him! Did you know that he had his dentures tinted to match his only remaining tooth? The DA must’ve been salivating,” said Jesse.
“Not as much as the judge was,” said Matt. “The old man actually stayed wide awake long enough to hear the question propounded and the answer given. He was up there on the bench grinning like the Cheshire cat, though I think I did detect some shallow breathing and rapid eye movement. So after the DA was through with the witness, my genius client Dewilliam Magpie—I swear to God that was his name—stood up, extended his arm, and pointed a stern and accusatory finger at the witness.”
“The jury must have loved that,” muttered Jesse.
Matt only shook his head dejectedly.
“Meanwhile, back at the defense table, here I am acting all nonchalant, but inside, you know my shit was going to pieces. After staring her in the eyes for a painful eternity or two, Dewilliam launched his brilliant question at her. I could see it! I swear I could see that idiotic question as it ran down from his shoulder, across his elbow, over his wrist, then leaped from his pointing, untrimmed fingernail! That question jumped from his inept brain like a madman leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge. ‘Miss Victim, did the man who attacked you happen to have a scar on his ass?’ ”
The entire table moaned in the throes of agony.
“At first the poor woman looked a bit puzzled by the question, but after a moment her eyes began to grow huge and a look of tremendous excitement transformed her face. ‘Yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘There was a scar on his buttocks! I remember it now! I saw it when he was done with me and getting dressed. It was jagged, like a bolt of lightning.’ As she said it, her index finger drew the shape in the air above the witness box. I could see that all of the jurors were leaning forward in the box. There were tears in her eyes and flowing down her cheeks. ‘It was on the right side.’
“Well,” said Matt, “y‘all know what happened next. The bailiff called for more backup, and right in front of the jury they dragged my fool client into the holding cell. Then they pulled down his pants and took a couple of Polaroid shots of his funky butt. Then they brought the defendant back into the courtroom and proceeded to give the pictures to the prosecutor. Both of those bailiffs were grinning like they’d just won the lottery, and when I saw that my heart fell through the floor. When the photographs were shown to the victim, she began sobbing at the top of her lungs. ’That’s the scar! Oh, my God, that’s the scar!‘ ”
The lawyers were roaring now in aching, throbbing spasms of ironic laughter. Dewilliam Magpie and others of his ilk were legendary, archetypal clients, men whose stupidity was used first as a sharp sword when they committed their awful crimes, then later as a frail shield to protect them when they were caught. Their stupidity would shield them against logic, against the tide of evidence, against the advice of counsel, and finally against the verdict and even against the sentence that would follow. It would protect them from everything but their own foolishness. Even years later Dewilliam would not be able to comprehend how it was that the victim had come to identify him in that courtroom.
Decades later, safely ensconced in the maximum-security wing of Folsom Prison, he would pass interminable hours and days blaming it all on his lawyer. His dumptruck, shyster lawyer had fucked him. Surrounded by tattooed men who declared themselves to be daring bank robbers and worldly drug traffickers, but who were, in actuality, only lewd pedophiles and compulsive mailbox thieves, he would proclaim his eternal martyrdom: “Muthafuckin’ lawyer fucked me.”
“Stupidity is always its own best defense,” said Jesse, his face caught somewhere between anger and pity. “I’ve had a hundred like Dewilliam Magpie. Five hundred.”
“Just tell us your worst one,” said Matt. “We of the defense, we of the single reasonable doubt, we of the long odds and the short end of every stick want only the finest draughts of sweet liqueur at this auspicious, albeit monthly gathering. Only the most sublime distillations of our craft are recounted here.” He raised his arm in a sweeping, evangelical gesture as he spoke.
“Do you mean,” said Jesse, smiling, “the dude who was accused of robbery and stood up in court and announced to the judge, ‘Your honor, you have to dismiss this case. I can’t identity this here victim. That ain’t the guy I robbed!’ ”
Jesse looked around the table at his laughing friends. They reminded him of his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. They had to laugh now and then and it was good that they did. Criminal defense is the emergency room of the law, and the constant pressure had to be relieved somehow. Grunts of the law, he thought, field medics performing triage in the crowded jails and holding cells behind the staid courtrooms. We tend the wounded, he thought, those who were wounded by life, by testosterone, by poverty. In this business, everyone gets wounded. Every lawy
er at the table had suffered for his or her clients.
Real trial lawyers were like weary foot soldiers or sweating defensive linemen in football—tireless, maverick, and cynical. Their true skill was measured by how far they strayed from the lawbooks and from the cant of sterilized language and practice. The prosecutors were offensive linemen—neat and efficient. They were an orderly phalanx, a disciplined picket line that always deployed in perfect five-meter spreads. In the stylized warfare of the courtroom, the defense lawyers were the guerrillas, the Vietcong.
But in all truth, this business of criminal justice was nothing like the infantry or football. Jesse shook his head without knowing it. He had been shaking his head in disgust for almost fifteen years. Somehow the action comforted him, freed him in some small measure from the war that haunted him. In the morning, after a bout with his nightmares of Vietnam, he would rise from bed shaking his head in sorrow.
Here, in the House of Toast, after a morning in court, he would shake his head in disgust. In this business, even the third- and fourth-stringers played. They were everywhere, maneuvering themselves to get the prettiest law clerk or the next judicial appointment. They had become public defender supervisors without caseloads. They had battered their clients into plea bargains. They had evolved into pipe-smoking elder-statesmen attorneys merely by their presence in the hallways for a decade or so. The Mexicans called such lawyers cagatintas, ink shitters. In the Hall of Justice, there were cagatintas everywhere.
Jesse shook his head once more. This army was top-heavy with deskbound colonels jockeying for judgeships. In this business, it was easy to hide. Beads of sweat began to form on Jesse’s brow as familiar feelings of anger rose up once again. His anger at the cagatintas was becoming muddled, confused with the horrid dreams that had wakened him so early this morning. He took a deep breath to calm himself. His internal heat began to subside only when he looked around the table and reminded himself that he was surrounded by grunts, people whose asses were still in the high grasses. There were no cagatintas here.