There was a certain amount of truth to that, Warren knew. Texas judges were elected — the only requisites were party backing and five years as a member of the bar. On his first day in office, a certain judge, a one-time insurance adjuster, had walked into his new chambers as the preceding judge was clearing out his law books. With some anxiety the new judge asked his law clerk, "Do I have to buy those books too?"
"The D.A.'s office doesn't much care for me," Parker rasped, "because I don't take crap from them. This is my courtroom — you better get that straight. No speeches for the peanut gallery. No tricks. Hint of a stunt like you pulled four years ago, you're out on your ass. You can fish in the bayou for a living."
Judge Parker waited, but this time Warren did not nod his head.
"I'm giving you this capital," she said, "because you finally had the guts to walk in and ask for a case, and I suppose every son of a bitch on this earth deserves a second chance. It's no great shakes, because it's a whale in a barrel for the state, but it's better than you've had in a long time. Just move it along. I'm not saying the defendant's guilty — I'm not allowed to say that. But I'm telling you that all the prosecutor has to do in this case is take aim and squeeze the trigger. So don't waste my time, understand? I expect you to plead it out for whatever you can get."
There it was. It could not have been clearer.
Lou Parker's dark eyes glinted. She blew cigarette smoke in the general direction of his face. "Now go see your client."
===OO=OOO=OO===
In the park opposite the eight-story ugly granite monolith of the courthouse, Warren found a quiet bench under an oak tree. He bought a hot dog from a vendor and ate it while he studied the Quintana file. Some mustard dripped onto the pages. Warren wiped it off with his breast pocket handkerchief.
An hour later he settled into a steel-backed chair in a Harris County Jail visitor's cubicle, as he once had with Virgil Freer. A modern facility, a massive cube twelve stories high — air-conditioned, computerized, with closed-circuit TV — the jail was never silent. Men yelled, women wept, telephones jangled, doors clanged. Warren sat at a shiny bare metal desk under fluorescent lighting so garishly bright that it made his eyes ache. He talked to Hector Quintana through a metal grill.
Quintana had smooth skin, black hair, an uncomplicated face. Warren guessed they were about the same age.
"Mr. Quintana, do you understand English?"
Quintana nodded, but Warren saw the uncertainty in the man's brown eyes.
He kept his speech simple. "My name is Warren Blackburn, and I'm a lawyer appointed by the court to represent your interests because you don't have the money to hire your own lawyer. The State of Texas will pay my fee, but I don't want you to think for one minute that means I work for them. I work for you now, Mr. Quintana, unless you have any objections to me. If you do, you'll have to explain them to Judge Parker. There's nothing you tell me about this case that I'll ever repeat to another living soul unless I have your permission. I'm bound by a solemn oath — what we lawyers call confidentiality and lawyer-client privilege. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Sir," Quintana said, "I didn't do what they say I did."
Warren ignored that. He would never ask Quintana if he had done it. That was the first rule of a criminal defense attorney, carved into his mind from the day he began practicing.
"Do you trust me?" Warren said.
"Yes, sir."
"Let's get rolling."
Warren formally told Hector Quintana that he had been accused of murdering, on or about the night of May 19, 1989, in Harris County, a man named Dan Ho Trunh, an electrician by trade, twenty-seven years old, married, the father of two children—
"I doan know this man," Quintana said.
"Let me finish, please."
Slowly, now and then using some of the Spanish he had learned in San Miguel de Allende, Warren explained that the indictment returned by the grand jury was for capital murder, because it was believed that the offense took place during the course of a robbery — Dan Ho Trunh's wallet had not been found on his person or in his car. Texas law mandated that if Hector Quintana stood trial and was found guilty of capital murder, or instead pled guilty to the court, there were only two possible penalties: life in prison or death by injection.
Quintana gasped. "But I doan kill this man. I doan know him. I try to rob a store, nada más."
Warren was used to this sequence. Few lawyers had ever introduced themselves to an accused murderer who said, "Glad to meet you, counselor. Sure I killed the sleazebag, and if you gave me the chance I'd do it again."
That came later, down a long road filled with rocky detours.
"Hector, suppose you tell me your version of what happened on the evening of May 19."
"I was borrachito," Quintana said. A little drunk.
"Where do you live?"
With friends near the stables in Hermann Park. In the evenings, behind a shed, they fried pork cracklings in a pot of deep fat. Sometimes they cooked menudo, a kind of tripe soup that was wonderful for a hangover. When he first came here he had pumped gas at a Mobil station. He had lost the job because he showed up one time borrachito and then hadn't shown up another time because of, he seemed to remember, the same reason. Later he worked as a handyman in a convenience store, a 7-Eleven. The 7-Eleven was a good job, but the franchise had been sold to a Vietnamese who paid Hector a week's wages and let him go because a brother-in-law wanted the job.
"Did that upset you?" Warren asked.
"I had no work. It wasn't fair."
Bad, Warren thought. If the D.A.'s office didn't know it now, they would surely find out. "And you were angry at being fired, weren't you, Mr. Quintana? And isn't it a fact that after you were fired you harbored a grudge against all Vietnamese people?"
Since February he had lived by doing odd jobs — cutting wood, knocking on people's doors and offering to wash cars for two dollars — but in April he gave up his bed in a barrio rooming house in order to save the rent and send money back to Francisca. That was when he began to sleep with his friends Pedro and Armando in the park by the stables. The policia didn't bother them if they were quiet. A few times he was asked to help clean up horseshit, and given five dollars for a morning's shoveling.
He found a shopping cart one day from the Safeway—
"Found? Where did you find it, Hector?"
"In the street, I doan remember…" But Quintana flushed, looked ashamed.
Warren didn't care. You had to batter at them a bit, make them see that it made no sense to tell petty lies. Big lies like "I didn't do it" were all right for a time. But the little lies blazed like neon. They could cost more than they were worth.
"You stole the shopping cart from the Safeway parking lot, isn't that so?"
"I found it. Maybe someone else stole it. Yo no — not I."
A stubborn man. But maybe it was true. You never knew. In theory, never quite translated into practice, you were innocent until proved guilty.
Quintana related to Warren the various treasures and staples he had inherited from apartment house Dumpsters and his wonder that they had been discarded while they still had a useful life. He went often to Ravendale and it was there, on that night, that he had found what was left of a bottle of whiskey. And la pistola.
After finishing the last swallow of Old Crow, Hector Quintana said, he decided to change his luck and rob the Circle K up on Bissonet. He shrugged, as if to say to Warren: this was no big deal. These are hard times. A man grows weary and relaxes his principles. The pistol was not loaded, and he was glad of that. But he believed that if he pointed it at the clerk in the store and ordered him to hand over what was in the cash register, the clerk would be frightened enough to do so without any fuss.
"There is something I wish you to understand," Quintana said, seeming to change course, looking at his lawyer with a clear gaze. "If I had not been a little drunk, I would not have done this thing."
Or not have been able to do
it, Warren thought. He remembered what Altschuler had said that morning: intoxication does not negate the crime.
The clerk in the Circle K claimed he couldn't get the cash register open. It often jammed like this, there was nothing to do except bang away. He said, Hector recalled, "Please don't shoot me, I'm doing my best." Finally the drawer crashed open, whereupon, in slow motion, he handed Hector a little over $120 in small bills and loose change.
"I was so happy," Hector told Warren, "that I thanked him. I went out into the street. But by then the police were there. They were so quick! I couldn't believe it…"
Two HPD cops leaped from a blue-and-white, revolvers drawn. "Police! Freeze, asshole! Drop the weapon at your feet! Kick it away from you!"
Hector had seen this scene so many times on TV that it seemed unreal, and yet at the same time he knew exactly what was required of him. Without being asked, he turned to lean against a nearby car so that they could frisk him and cuff him.
"Did they tell you that you had the right to remain silent, the right to a lawyer, and so forth?"
"Yes, it was the same as on TV."
Only late the next day, here in jail, did the matter of murder arise. He couldn't believe they were serious. He told them they had the wrong man. But it was clear that they didn't believe him.
Warren asked him where he had been earlier on the evening of May 19, before he arrived at Ravendale.
Walking around, just thinking about Francisca and his children. He was from El Palmito, a village near the city of San Luis Potosi in north-central Mexico. He had married at the age of twenty. He was given a scrawny milk cow as a gift from his in-laws, a sway-backed burro from his father, and a patch of bare land on the bank of a stream where warm mineral water flowed. Still, in the end, with the rising prices, it was not enough to live on.
"And in those hours before you found the gun in the Dumpster, did you talk to anyone? Did you meet anyone you knew?"
He had knocked on a few doors, Quintana recalled, to ask if anyone wanted their car washed. No one had wanted.
Warren thought diligently for a minute. "Let's focus on la pistola, Hector. It's the same one that was used to murder a Vietnamese man earlier that evening, and the fact that you had it in your possession is very bad. You understand that, don't you?"
"There were no bullets in it," Quintana said. "I tole you."
"Did you ever show that pistol to anyone? To any of your friends at the stables?"
"How could that be?" Quintana asked, puzzled.
"It would be foolish of you to lie to me about the pistol. If you do that, I can't help you. I'll get my ass caught in a wringer and so will you. And it'll hurt you a lot more than me."
Quintana looked him in the eye. It was a look he had not shown before: it was slightly menacing.
"If you think," he said in Spanish, "that you can make me say I killed a man, or ever fired that pistol, you are betting on a lame cock. Perhaps, as you say, I must ask the judge for another lawyer."
"Don't get your feathers ruffled," Warren said sternly, gathering up his papers. "I'll be back."
Maximum Gene had told Warren a story of an old mountaineer who said of his pancakes, "No matter how thin I mix 'em, there's always two sides."
Warren would have to find out the other side of Hector Quintana's pancakes. Unfortunately, the best person to ask under these circumstances was the prosecutor. That was Assistant District Attorney Nancy Goodpaster, to whom Warren had lied four years ago about Virgil Freer's prior convictions.
When he reached the seventh floor and entered the windowless 299th District Court, Judge Lou Parker was calling the roll of defendants and attorneys. "No talking in court," the judge said in her spikiest tone to some women on the rear bench.
Warren caught Nancy Goodpaster's eye and walked back with her to her cool little office next to Parker's chambers. It was crowded with case files and a computer terminal. The desk was neat, and he noticed a photograph of a gray-haired black couple that he assumed were Goodpaster's parents. Their smiles shone proudly in the direction of a four-volume set of the Texas Prosecutor's Trial Manual.
"The judge is not in a good mood today," Warren said.
Settling herself behind the desk in a steel-backed swivel chair, Goodpaster looked at him calmly. "The judge is in the mood she's always in. We all live with it."
There was an unspoken coda: and unless you're a fool, you'll live with it too.
"She gets things done," Goodpaster added, with what Warren took as a grudging note of apology. "In the 299th we move right along." But again she was also saying: and you'd better move right along with us.
When Goodpaster had been fresh out of law school and had missed Virgil Freer's priors in the case file, she had been soft-faced and fluttery. She had picked the skin off her thumb whenever he talked to her, and the grave air she had projected Warren had taken as a cover-up for her gratitude that she was suddenly being taken seriously as an attorney. Now she was a veteran at the age of thirty, the ranking prosecutor in the 299th. A slim and delicate young woman, she wore her short black hair in a pageboy. She no longer affected the severely tailored suits and oversized bow ties that young female lawyers wear in order to look more like young male lawyers. Today she was dressed in a loose skirt and black blouse and casual light tan jacket. No tie, no rings or jewelry. Her thin hands were steady on the sheaf of papers in front of her. She didn't pick at her thumbs anymore.
"Mr. Blackburn," she said, "I'm looking to settle this case. So let's get down to it."
Five years with Lou Parker and the State of Texas, he thought, and she's a gunfighter.
He nodded at the file on her government metal desk. "What have you got?"
What she had, she said flatly, was a good case. She had motive, opportunity, and possession of the murder weapon.
"Any Brady material?" Warren asked.
Brady material was evidence that might help a defendant or impeach the credibility of a prosecution witness — so named because of Brady v. Maryland, wherein the Supreme Court reversed a conviction because the prosecutor had withheld information that might have proved the defendant innocent. You could squeeze more juice from a week-old cut lemon than Brady material from the Harris County district attorney's office. Their attitude was: you find it. There were lies of commission and lies of omission, Warren thought. And the state protects its minions.
"Not a thing," Goodpaster said.
The motive for the murder was money. The victim's family would testify that when he left the house that morning, Dan Ho Trunh had more than fifty dollars in his wallet, and it had been established that during the course of that day he had been paid at least ninety dollars in cash for electrical repair work he had done. His wallet had not been found.
As for opportunity, an hour after the murder Hector Quintana had been picked up within a mile of the crime scene. If he had an alibi, it had not yet surfaced.
Warren coughed, said nothing.
Ballistics confirmed that the murder weapon was the same .32-caliber Diamondback Colt clutched in Hector Quintana's hand when he ran out of the Circle K on Bissonet. They had traced the gun and discovered its most recent recorded purchase was five years ago, from a pawn shop in Dallas. The buyer had given phony I.D.
"And when Quintana walked into the Circle K the gun was empty, right?"
Goodpaster nodded. "He was drunk, the police offense report says. Maybe too drunk to think of reloading."
"They gave him a Breathalyzer test?"
"They could smell the booze on him." For the first time since Warren had been in the office, Goodpaster allowed herself to look other than solemn. She said smugly, "Whether Quintana was drunk or not, I could care less. He's not under indictment for D&D or armed robbery of a convenience store. This is capital murder."
Warren leaned back in the wooden chair, making a steeple of his hands. "But you have no witnesses."
"What makes you think so? We have a witness who saw him at the crime scene, and two days
later she picked him out of a lineup. Sorry, Mr. Blackburn."
He did not reply, but his face answered her. Goodpaster reached into the file and plucked out a stapled sheaf of papers. She tossed them across the desk to the unhappy defense attorney.
===OO=OOO=OO===
A few days later, once again, Hector Quintana glared at Warren through the metal mesh. The rich brown Indio eyes were eloquent with anger and desolation, but the dark flesh had begun to take on some of the pastiness common to men who saw the sky through sealed grilled windows and breathed artificially chilled air night and day. The eyes would change next: any liveliness would blur. The desolation would remain, but the anger would turn to ennui.
He was doing okay, Hector said. He was working in the kitchen as a dishwasher.
"Don't talk to anyone about the case," Warren warned him. "Jails are full of snitches."
"No one asks me why I'm here." Quintana sounded a little bewildered at that.
"That's jail etiquette. You didn't tell me," he said quietly, "that you'd been in a lineup."
"What is a lineup?"
"The police make you stand with a bunch of other guys facing a mirror. Then they make you stand in profile. Each of you holds up a number."
"Oh," Quintana said wearily, unconcerned. "That happened. I held up Number Five. I didn't know what it meant."
"I thought you said you'd watched a lot of TV."
Quintana glared at him again.
"What happens in a lineup," Warren explained, giving his client the benefit of the doubt, "is that there are people on the other side of the mirror. They can see you but you can't see them. In this instance, there was an Indian woman named Siva Singh on the other side of the glass, and she picked you out. She said, 'That's him.'"
Him meant the man whom Siva Singh had seen running away from the shopping complex on Wesleyan. Singh had been in the back of the Wesleyan Terrace Laundry & Dry Cleaners, slipping suits and dresses into plastic sheaths. She had heard what she later realized was a gunshot. Coming up to the front of the store a minute or two later, she had noticed a man standing by a station wagon parked in the lot. And the next minute: "My goodness, he was running away very fast."
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 5