Charm stole a week's vacation from reporting and flew down to join him. They stayed in a little inn on a narrow cobbled street where purple bougainvillea climbed over the balcony, with a view of a cathedral that some visionary eighteenth-century Indio architect had designed from postcards of Chartres. The town smelled of flowers and donkey shit. In the cool rainy afternoons they made love while cathedral bells clanged, mongrels barked. Warren remembered it as the best week of his marriage, even better than their honeymoon on Maui. Charm said, "You're a good man. When this is all over, honey, you'll be fine."
Banishment ended, he appeared at the courthouse to inform the world that he was again ready to practice law. Except for the judges and prosecutors, everyone was friendly, backslapping. But it was referrals he needed: clients, not lunch companions. An occasional misdemeanor or minor drug case came his way, but most of the time he sat in his office annotating his cookbooks and reading current volumes of the American Criminal Law Review.
Charm organized dinner parties for lawyers and their wives and husbands. Warren prepared escargots and coq au vin. The dinners were lively. Rick Levine — short, black-haired, with a flaring mustache, sloping nose, and the beginnings of a paunch — gravely said, "Maybe you should open up a restaurant."
"If you didn't expect to fatten up on the cuff, I might just do it."
Warren and Rick had been schoolmates together at Lamarr High, then at UT-Austin, class of '77, then at South Texas College of Law in Houston. Rick had become a defense attorney specializing in drug cases, figuring his fees by the kilo: $500 for marijuana, $5,000 for cocaine. He owned four racehorses stabled nearby in Louisiana. Two were named after his young children. Another was called Acapulco Gold, another White Lady.
One night after dinner Warren drew Rick outside to the terrace. "So I made a mistake once, but I'm still a damned good lawyer. Don't people remember that?"
"I imagine," Rick said, "that prospective clients may think that some of the judges are a little prejudiced against you. And that might be true. Everyone wants an edge, not a liability. I know it's bullshit, but that's how people are."
Warren realized that Rick had heard something. Maybe he would be a liability to a client. The thought shocked him a little.
Maybe I'm not tough enough: that, he realized, was what Charm had been trying to say. It could be that in this business you needed skin of leather and no heart. He remembered a Houston Oilers defensive tackle he had defended in a cocaine possession case some years ago. The football player said, "There's these rookies, see, at training camp? They show up on the field at seven in the morning to run laps and they work out until seven in the evening. Me, I show up at ten, leave at three. And they get cut, and I stay. They can't ever figure it out. See what I'm saying? They don't have it — whatever it is — and I do."
Warren came to question whether he had it, whatever it was. But he also remembered William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech, where the old writer had said that our task was not merely to survive, but to prevail.
I'll prevail, Warren vowed. And to prove to his peers and betters that one lapse in judgment had diminished neither his skills nor his respect for the law, he began hustling court appointments.
Houston, alone among major cities, employed no public defender's office. If an accused claimed he was too poor to hire counsel, the judge would appoint a lawyer and order a legal fee paid out of public funds. Each morning at eight o'clock, hungry defense attorneys left their business cards on the bench at the judge's elbow, then crowded around the desks of the court coordinators who helped dispense the cases. Some lawyers, fresh out of law school, officed out of the courthouse basement cafeteria where the overhead was the price of an overcooked hamburger and a cup of weak coffee; they sought court-appointed work in order to gain experience. Older lawyers hustled for it when their collars were frayed and they smelled of stale tobacco.
When he was younger, more brash, Warren likened the older lawyers to vultures waiting for dead meat. Now he was more forgiving. He was one of them.
He did court-appointed work for two years. It was survival. He never went to trial: all the cases were plea-bargained. Warren once overheard a journeyman lawyer tell a judge, "You can pay me $300 and I'll plead this guy guilty and move it through real smooth, or you can get some other guy for $150 who'll fuck up your docket. Up to you, your honor." Warren spent his days haggling like a merchant in a North African bazaar. He dealt with drunken drivers, vagrants, addicts and small-time crack dealers, the trash of the streets and ghettos. The court dockets were jammed — sentences were handed down swiftly, often by rote. Most of the judges' stone-faced speeches were generated by computers. The prosecutors were impatient, ambitious. The price of mercy was time. And no one had time.
Some days Warren wanted to smash his fists against the courtroom walls in frustration. I'm a trial lawyer, he thought bitterly, that's where I shine, that's what I love. For the sake of a son of a bitch like Virgil Freer I gave all that up. He grew depressed, moody. His face began to lose its youthful sparkle.
But still in his daydreams, like a lover whose indifferent mistress is far away, he embraced the shadowy belief that if he kept working at it and did his best, he could somehow claw his way back to where he had been before he lied to save his client who was now doing thirty years at Huntsville prison for armed robbery and attempted murder of a police officer, and whose scruffy, scrapping, shallow-eyed children, for whom Warren had felt such pity, were thrown away on the common garbage heap of life. If I live long enough, he thought with a renewed burst of outrage and shame, one day I'll be plea-bargaining for them too.
Rain beat on the roof, lightning crackled across the horizon. Behind each stroke the lightning left a wake of heated air that came to them as thunder. Charm Blackburn cried out softly and it woke Warren, who calmed her with whispers and touches until she subsided into uneasy sleep. The digital clock showed 3:30 A.M.: Friday, May 19, 1989. For a while Warren listened to the rain and the banshee wind.
The lawn sprinklers popped up at six o'clock, arcing their spray onto the soaked grass. Warren woke again, this time with an erection, which he attributed to his wife's presence on his side of the bed. Usually Charm hugged her down pillow and kept far to her own side, for the bony parts of Warren's body disturbed her sleep. But this morning she was behind him, breasts pressed against his shoulder blades, breath in his ear. He took that closeness to be a hangover from the storm and the unnamed fears it arouses in those of us whose roots are not strong.
Twisting toward her, he whispered her name. Charm opened her eyes to slits, but slid a hand from under the sheet to wag her finger briefly in front of Warren's nose. The wave was the same one she had learned to use down in San Miguel de Allende to fend off urchins who nagged for pesos. The kids backed off. Then Charm would say, "Oh, God, how could I have done that?" and chase after them to press coins in their hands.
"What time is it?" she whispered.
"Six-fifteen."
She turned away from him and pulled the comforter over her head.
The clouds rushed westward, birds chirped on the lawn. Sliding out of bed, Warren embraced Oobie, his arthritic old golden retriever who slept on the carpet at the foot of the bed, and then slipped into his gray sweats. With Oobie joyfully limping and panting at his side he jogged for twenty minutes along Braes Bayou. At home again he showered, brewed coffee, and with it ate a bowl of Mueslix and a banana from the tree by the pool.
He dressed quietly, careful not to wake Charm. Looking down at what he could see of his wife — some strands of dark blond hair, a curve of ivory cheek, a familiar shape in a fetal curl under the covers — he whispered, "I love you."
A few minutes after seven he was in his BMW on the Southwest Freeway under a blue sky scrubbed by the night's rain. Under it you could dream of wranglers riding up from the Brazos and the old paddleboats churning foam on Buffalo Bayou. And indeed, Warren dreamed as he drove. But he dreamed that he was married to a woman who still adore
d him, that his office telephone never stopped ringing, that he was in control of his life. The wholeness of things held sway. He knew that he had to make a move or the center would fall apart.
===OO=OOO=OO===
From a telephone outside the basement cafeteria in the courthouse, he called his answering service. The only message of consequence was a request to call Scoot Shepard's office. Dropping another quarter into the slot, Warren returned the call. A secretary informed him that Mr. Shepard was in a pretrial hearing in the 342nd District Court.
"And what's happening in the 342nd?" Warren asked.
"A setting of bail in the Ott case," the secretary said.
"If I can't catch him there," Warren promised, "I'll call back."
Scoot Shepard was the dean of Houston criminal defense attorneys; he had been a friend of Warren's father. Few people are legends in their own time, but Scoot was one. In the trial of John R. Baker, the oil multimillionaire accused of poisoning his society wife, Scoot had hung the jury twice in a row until the case ultimately was dismissed. He had represented Martha Sachs, the sex doctor accused of murdering her woman lover in front of two witnesses, and won an acquittal. Scoot had defended major drug dealers and Mafia capos and got them off when there was little more than a hazy hope or a muttered Sicilian prayer. He had been profiled in Time and even Vanity Fair, and had been asked by a dozen New York publishers to write a book about his cases. Declining, he was quoted as saying, "Once I give away my secret, what advantage have I got?" But there was minimal honesty in that, Warren decided. Nobody could learn from a book what Scoot knew.
Warren took the elevator up to the fifth floor and the 342nd District Court. Under a lofty ceiling, its walnut-paneled walls were lined with oil portraits of robed judges from decades past. The current presiding resident of the 342nd, Judge Dwight Bingham, was one of Harris County's four black judges. His courtroom was the most spacious and dignified in the courthouse; he had earned it by seniority. "But what Dwight Bingham knows about the law," Warren's father had said, when Warren had just begun practicing, "you could stuff into a wetback's taco. He's too easy, too friendly. He doesn't like to send young niggers to prison on the theory that they get buttfucked and come out more violent than they went in. He's got what I suppose you and your hippie friends would call… compassion."
Warren liked and admired Judge Bingham. The law could be harsh. Good law became bad law if bad men administered it. The world was crueler than most people would admit, Warren believed, and it needed all the compassion available.
Ten days ago, in a familiar ritual, the clerk at the Office of the District Attorney had spun the birdcage that held colored Ping-Pong balls with the numbers of the twenty-six Harris County courts. The yellow ball with Judge Bingham's number had popped out; he had drawn the plum of the current season, the Ott murder case. The accused, the owner of a topless nightclub, had killed her lover, Dr. Clyde Ott, a multimillionaire gynecologist who owned drug detox clinics throughout Harris County. The State of Texas was charging willful murder; Scoot Shepard, on behalf of the defendant, had pled self-defense. For weeks the murder had been a lead story on the evening news. The trial was on the docket for late July, guaranteed to make headlines every day — the kind of trial a lawyer loved.
Nearing seventy years of age and ready to retire, Judge Bingham sat on the high walnut bench framed against the Great Seal of Texas. Although today's event was merely a routine application for reduction of bail for the defendant, there was no room in front of the bar on the courtroom bench reserved for lawyers. Warren squeezed into one of the spectators' pews, noting that more than a few defense attorneys and prosecutors were scattered among the crowd. They had come to hear Scoot Shepard, the maestro. Young lawyers learned from him, veterans simply enjoyed him.
Chunky, about five-ten, Scoot had a pale, domelike forehead, and his slightly bloodshot eyes were black disks set deep into his head. His nose was large and fleshy. Today he wore a wrinkled suit. Warren had always thought he could pass for an oil rig operator on holiday in Vegas.
Dim yellow lights gleamed from the high paneled ceiling onto Judge Bingham's bald brown head. He looked up from some papers and said gently, "All right now, Mr. Shepard, I've read this application on behalf of your client, Ms. Johnnie Faye Boudreau. You want me to reduce her bail from $300,000 to $50,000. I'm not sure I can do that."
Scoot Shepard scrambled awkwardly to his feet. "Your honor, my client's got the best reason a defendant can have. She's broke."
Judge Bingham looked across the courtroom at the frowning face of Assistant District Attorney Bob Altschuler, chief prosecutor in the 342nd. "I take it," the judge said, "that the State of Texas disagrees."
"Yes, your honor, and for the best reasons the state could have." Altschuler was already standing, feet planted wide apart like a wrestler's. A bulky, handsome man of forty-five, with snapping brown eyes and a full head of pepper-and-salt hair, he folded his arms in a truculent posture. "This is a murder charge. No question that the defendant, Ms. Boudreau, shot the victim, Dr. Ott, who wasn't armed. She's admitted it."
"No, no, no," Scoot Shepard murmured, barely audibly.
Judge Bingham said to the prosecutor, "Well, these papers claim that Ms. Boudreau surrendered voluntarily to the police. Says here that she lives in town, is gainfully employed, has roots in the community, and isn't going anywhere, even assuming she's got someplace to go. And she's showed up today." He peered down in a kindly manner at Bob Altschuler; they worked together nearly every day. "What's your contention, Mr. Prosecutor? Here today, gone tomorrow?"
"The state's contention," Altschuler said, "is that the defendant can afford the $300,000 bail set by this court before Mr. Scoot Shepard came on the scene. Especially if the defendant can afford to hire Mr. Shepard."
"Ah, but that's the point!" Scoot cried, taking a fencing step forward. "I don't come cheap! The amount of current bail might make it impossible for this lady to pay my fee! What if it comes down to a choice between me and bail? I know there are a lot of other good lawyers around town, and I'm not the spryest or the youngest, maybe not even the smartest." He spread his hands before the elderly judge. "But she wants me. What can we do about that, your honor?"
"Well, that might be a pity," the judge said. "We might be deprived of a fine trial."
Sitting on the bench in the rear, Warren smiled. He understood that Judge Bingham liked to perform for Scoot, or with him, especially with reporters sitting in his courtroom.
The judge peered down now at the defendant, Johnnie Faye Boudreau, sitting alone at the defense table. "Ma'am, you claim you don't own that topless nightclub out on Richmond that everybody says you own. What's it called?" Adjusting the horn-rimmed bifocals on his fleshy nose, he rustled the papers set before him. "Ecstasy! What a provocative name. Is that right? Is that your contention?"
Scoot walked back and bent to whisper to his client. Then he said to the court, "Your honor, Ms. Boudreau has a slight sore throat, and this is a mighty cavernous courtroom. I don't want her to have to shout and aggravate her condition. May we and Mr. Altschuler approach the bench for this discussion?"
"Of course you may, Mr. Scoot," the judge said.
Johnnie Faye Boudreau rose slowly from her chair. This May morning in the air-conditioned courtroom she wore a white linen suit with high heels to match, one strand of cultured pearls and an emerald ring. She had admitted she was forty years old but could have passed for thirty. Two decades ago she had been voted Miss Corpus Christi and then runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant. Now there was hardly a wrinkle on her face and her hands were as smooth as vellum. She had high breasts, flaring hips, and a remarkably narrow waist. Her most remarkable feature, however, was the color of her eyes. The left one was hazel, the right one a cool gray-blue. Few people noticed that at first. They just felt uncomfortable under her gaze.
She took several steps toward the judicial bench, then turned and went back for her handbag. Zoologists would have described her walk as
that of a tiger in estrus. Even Judge Bingham gazed at her swaying buttocks.
As she reversed course and approached the judge a second time, Warren Blackburn watched too from his seat on the back bench. Look like a pair of boar shoats squirming around in a gunnysack, he thought.
The courtroom grew still. Everyone strained to hear.
"That's right, your honor," Johnnie Faye Boudreau said in a husky, relaxed voice. "I don't own Ecstasy. I just work there."
Scoot took over: "She's on salary, your honor — $40,000 a year, paid monthly. She borrowed the money from her employers to put up that high bond. Borrowed it at twelve percent interest. Her only current assets are a bank account with under two thousand dollars, some jewelry, and a car."
"Her car is a two-year-old Mercedes 450-SL," the judge pointed out.
"She's got good taste," Scoot said. "And we wouldn't take that car away, would we? How would she get to work?"
"Or to court, for her trial," Judge Bingham added.
Bob Altschuler, scowling, leaned his weight toward the defendant. "Ms. Boudreau, are you telling the State of Texas and this court that you have no stocks, bonds, savings accounts, mutual funds, CDs, money market accounts, or any other negotiable assets?"
Johnnie Faye Boudreau's wide mouth curved into a smile. "No, sir. Nothing except my checking account at Bank of America and the clothes on my back."
"And a few clothes in your closets at home, I'm sure."
"A few," Johnnie Faye said. "Do y'all want me to sell some of them?"
Perched on the edge of their seats, the reporters from the Post and the Chronicle scribbled in their notebooks. That was quotable.
Judge Bingham said, "Mr. Bob, these papers tell me that if the bail is reduced, Ms. Boudreau's employer — this corporation owned by some oil people over in Louisiana — is ready to lend the money back to Ms. Boudreau. Then she can pay Mr. Shepard and we can get on with this case. Otherwise, Mr. Shepard isn't going to appear and you are going to be deprived of a worthy opponent. What do you say to that?"
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 2