She rarely went outside in the summer heat unless it was necessary. She went about her business and a few minutes later a customer came in to drop off some dry cleaning. The police offense report noted the customer's name as Rona Morrison, forty-five, a white divorced female, mother of two, who worked as a clerk at Better Buy Motors on Bissonet.
On her way back to her car, Morrison glanced in the window of the station wagon.
Siva Singh heard a scream. She hurried outside and found Morrison on her knees in the parking lot, gagging. Singh then peered inside the station wagon and saw the dead man. She brought Morrison into the store, settled her on a chair, and telephoned 911.
When the HPD squad car arrived, Singh was interviewed by homicide sergeants Hollis Thiel and Craig Douglas. That was when she described the man she had seen running away as "about five feet nine or five feet ten inches tall, with long black hair, and he wore just a pair of trousers with a shirt. He wore no jacket. He looked, if I may say so, to be poor and homeless. He was white, not colored. I thought he might have been Hispanic." She had never seen him before in her life.
Downtown at Harris County Jail the next morning she picked Hector Quintana out of a lineup of six men. "It is most certainly number five."
Warren related most of this to Quintana, whose hair was black and could be described as long.
"What were you wearing that night, Hector, when you held up the Circle K?"
"A shirt and pants."
"No jacket?"
"Was a hot night. My jacket was in my shopping cart."
"Where was the shopping cart?"
"I left it under a stairway near where I found the gun. I was going to return there and get it."
"This is not good." Warren shook his head gloomily. "The Indian woman says it was you she saw running away. Can you explain to me how that's possible? And please think a minute before you answer."
"I doan have to think a minute," Quintana grumbled. "She saw someone else. Yo no."
"That's your story? That you were never near that station wagon, that dry cleaners? That you never ran away from the shopping center? Understand, I'm not asking if you shot and killed this man — I'm just asking if you ran away from there or any other place. No crime in running away."
The glare intensified. "If you doan believe me—"
"I know, I know. I'm betting on a lame cock." Warren grinned to establish some camaraderie, then let the expression wither. The tough part came now. The dialogue between lawyer and accused client was a process of discovery, a voyage through jagged shoals in stormy weather, often a voyage from obscurity to painful light. The fact of Quintana's denial of guilt was beside the point. Men had been known to deny guilt until the very moment they stepped into the courtroom and saw the grim faces of the jury. Texas juries killed. That was part of their heritage.
"Hector, I hear everything you're telling me. I believe you. But I'm a lawyer, not your mother. I have to look at the evidence, because that's what a jury is going to look at. So… I'm not saying it's true or not, but here's this Indian woman who's going to get on the witness stand and point a finger in your face and state that she saw you running away from the scene of the crime. And the HPD ballistics expert is going to say that the gun you had in your hand an hour after the murder was the gun that killed this Vietnamese man. That's bad, very bad. Do you see all that, Hector?"
Quintana nodded gravely.
"Now, what have I, as your defense lawyer, got to tell the jury? I can't tell them you were somewhere else when the murder was committed, because I can't produce a single live body who can verify it. I can't say you're a peace-loving citizen, because in the first place you're not a citizen, which is neither here nor there, but in the second place you were caught robbing a convenience store with a gun. Not a peace-loving act. You were drunk, but that won't help you. Hector, what I'm trying to tell you is — you are in deep shit. Mierda profunda," he added, translating literally.
This was usually the moment when the defendant lowered his head, gripped the metal mesh until his knuckles turned white, and then said, with immense and bitter effort — because the world was pressing in on him and he finally understood the terrifying price he had to pay for his sins and no doubt his stupidity — "What can you do for me if I plead guilty?"
That Hector Quintana was guilty of murdering Dan Ho Trunh, Warren had almost no doubt. The qualifier was there not only because he liked Quintana — he was all too wary now of the consequences that might arise from liking a client — but because he thought he saw in the man's face a kind of peaceable gravity he had seen on the faces of many poor men in Mexico. Men who might get pissy-eyed drunk on Saturday night and lie down in the cobbled streets and bay at the moon, but not men who would kill unless they were seriously insulted or had a vision that some fool was making a public pass at their woman. No psychotic Mexican climbed to the top of a university tower with a high-powered rifle and sprayed random bullets. None butchered his wife and children and then slit his own throat. There were plenty of murders down there in the drug trade, but usually if men robbed you it was because they were poor — they took your money and split to go home to their Rosa or Carmencita or get drunk with their compañeros. The conquistadors and then the hacienda owners had whipped most of them into a state of subservience. Machismo, which they'd lapped up with their mother's milk, didn't equate with violence.
But there must be exceptions, Warren thought, and maybe Quintana was one of them. The evidence certainly suggested it. As a lawyer, and with the best interests of his client in mind, Warren had to deal with the evidence.
He had one more idea, sprung from his thoughts about the men he had sometimes seen sprawled in the early hours of Sunday morning outside the cantinas of San Miguel de Allende.
"Hector, I know that when men get drunk they do things they wouldn't do otherwise. They get crazy. I'm not saying it's true, but maybe you bumped into this Vietnamese guy in that parking lot. Maybe he was a stupid son of a bitch, and he insulted you — said something nasty to you about your being a Mexican, a wetback. Is that possible?" Warren felt his cheeks warm up with enthusiasm. "If it is, then I can get up there and explain a lot of things to the judge" — a picture of Lou Parker on the bench popped into his mind, and quickly he amended that — "or to the jury, because if we plead guilty we have the right to ask for a jury to do the sentencing. And if you're straight with me, and I'm straight with them, the jury will understand why what happened happened ..." Realizing that his client was barely listening, he shrugged. "… if it happened."
Quintana said in his soft voice, "There will be a trial?"
Warren ground his teeth. This was some stubborn bastard.
"There can be a trial by jury. Twelve men and women. Your peers. Plain people."
"Can I speak to the jury?"
"You have that right. It will be testimony under oath."
"Then I will tell the jury that it's not true, that this woman makes a mistake, and that I doan ever know this man and doan kill him."
Warren cleared his throat to hold back his impatience, leaning forward to the mesh. "If there's a trial," he said quietly, "and you testify and they find you guilty, the jury will sentence you either to death by cyanide injection or to life in the penitentiary. That's the law. The jury can't deviate."
"But I will tell them, and they will believe me even if you don't. I will tell them," Quintana repeated desperately.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Warren walked at a slow pace through the twisting underground tunnel that connected the Harris County Jail with the courthouse, where he bumped into Myron Moore, a burly fifty-year-old lawyer who always reminded him of Idi Amin. Around the courthouse Moore was called Dr. Doom. He made heavy contributions each year to the campaign funds of nearly all the judges, and if there was a capital murder involving an indigent defendant, Moore was at the top of nearly every judge's list — he would plead anyone guilty and if he was forced to go before a jury he guaranteed the quickest trial po
ssible. The lawyers joked that the Texas Department of Corrections was considering opening a Myron Moore Unit just to house his clients.
Moore stopped him in the tunnel. "I hear you cut me out of a capital in Lou Parker's court. You need any help over there?"
"Not yet, Myron."
"Who's prosecuting?"
"Nancy Goodpaster."
"Play her tough," Moore said. "Don't give her nothing. She's just another dumb ole Texas nigger gal."
Warren frowned but decided not to comment. "What's Scoot Shepard doing in the 181st, Myron?"
"A DWI trial. The mighty have fallen."
"I doubt it. Must be a good fee."
Continuing through the tunnel to the courthouse, thinking about Hector Quintana, Warren felt a barbed pain in the upper part of his back. No fucking wonder. It was a hopeless case. The judge had been clear: "Don't waste my time. I expect you to plead it out for whatever you can get." This sorry Mexican is giving me a hard time, Warren thought. And I like the man. I don't want him to die.
It occurred to him then that Hector Quintana had never asked what would happen if he were willing to plead guilty.
Warren would have said, "I can plea-bargain, Hector. The charge that the murder was committed during the course of a robbery is what turns it into capital murder. The prosecutor's not particularly vicious — believe me, there are worse. If you wanted to plead guilty, I could try to get her to reduce the charge to plain murder. Vanilla murder. She'd probably go for it — she knows the judge doesn't want to tie up the court with a long trial. You can get hit with five years probation up to life in prison. The prosecutor will make a recommendation and the judge will buy it. That's the system, that's how it works. I'd try for thirty years. The prisons upstate are crowded, they're fighting for space. You could be out in fifteen years."
If Quintana agreed, that would be a minor blessing for everybody. Warren would be in Lou Parker's good graces. Word would spread. A small start, but still a start. And Quintana would stay alive and one day see his Francisca again.
But if Warren took the case to a jury and they gave his man death, which seemed an excellent possibility, he would be worse off than when he started. They would say he had thrown away a defendant's life for the chance to play to the crowd. Not easy to live with. A lawyer's responsibility in a capital case with powerful state's evidence was to see that the client came out of it alive.
And I can't take it to trial, he thought, reaching the end of the gloomily lit tunnel, pausing at the door to the courthouse. That's the deal with Lou Parker.
He took the elevator up to the 181st on the third floor, passed the bar and squeezed onto the front bench reserved for lawyers. Again, with Scoot Shepard at work, the courtroom was crowded. The defendant, a thirty-five-year-old bank vice-president with a handlebar mustache, looking debonair but concerned, sat next to Scoot at the defense table. Warren had been right: there was a good fee.
Scoot was in the midst of cross-examining a young police officer with an alert expression on his face. The bank vice-president had been pulled over one night for weaving back and forth on the freeway at an erratic rate of speed. The police officer had asked him to recite the alphabet and the banker had failed to do so accurately.
Scoot asked the officer if he knew how to recite the alphabet.
"Yes, I do."
"Would you do it, please, for the benefit of the jury? And may I approach the witness, your honor? I'm just a tad hard of hearing, and I want to make sure I catch every little letter."
With the defense attorney only a few feet away from him and staring intently in his face, the young cop tried his luck. "A-b-c-d-e-f-g-h-i-j-k-1-m-n-o-p-r… ah… p-q-r-s…" Predictably, he blushed. "No, wait a minute, let me start over."
"You must be drunk," Scoot said.
The officer laughed uneasily. "No, sir, I'm not drunk, I'm just temporarily confused."
"And didn't it appear to you on the night of March 5 that my client might also have been confused?"
The officer boldly said, "I'm not confused, I'm nervous. Because you're standing very close to me, sir."
"And weren't you standing close to my client on the night of March 5? And are you nervous the same way someone might be nervous who's stopped at one o'clock in the morning by two Houston police officers who accuse him of being intoxicated when he knows he's not?"
The police officer said, "Your client had no reason to be nervous. But I do."
"Why? You're not going to jail."
"But you're a famous lawyer, and I don't want people to think you can make a monkey out of me. And I do know the alphabet."
The judge laughed. The jury laughed. Even the prosecutor grinned.
"I'm sure you know the alphabet. You're a bright man. Pass the witness," Scoot said.
The judge declared a two-hour break for lunch. Scoot immediately came up to Warren, squeezed his hand and said, "Let's trot over to my office. I'll have Brenda send out for sandwiches. These goddam restaurants around here, air-conditioning's so high I get icicles on my nuts."
But five minutes later when they reached Scoot's office on the sixteenth floor of the Republic Bank Building, Warren said, "For God's sake, Scoot, it's five degrees colder here than my refrigerator."
"I'll lend you a shawl, I've got plenty." Marching down the long carpeted corridor, Scoot offered a cheery hello to one of his law clerks. In his office he pulled two cans of Lone Star beer from a diminished six-pack in the little refrigerator behind his desk. The rosewood desk was bare except for a yellow legal pad, a jar of pencils, and several stacked volumes of Reversible Errors in Texas Criminal Cases. Brenda was dispatched into the heat for turkey sandwiches and another six-pack. Scoot lit a cigarette, popped the beer can, and dropped with a sigh into his leather armchair.
Scoot had wanted a drink, Warren realized, and not in public. An old tale.
Sixth child of a rag-dealer father and an alcoholic mother, Scoot (born Joseph Howard Shepard) had grown up in Houston's Fourth Ward. A street kid, a carouser, he had put himself through college by running numbers — his nickname came from his speed in delivery — and then law school at the University of Houston. Some years before Warren's father died, Warren had asked him: what is Scoot's secret, the one he'll never tell?
"It's no secret at all," Judge Blackburn said. "He just lives by it better than most people. Lawyering is acting, a con game. Assuming his case has some merit, if a lawyer gets a jury to like him and then trust him more than the son of a bitch who's arguing against him, he's home free. Beyond that, Scoot's prepared. And he can size up a witness after he listens to him for five minutes. Knows what it'll take to cozy up to him or get him so mad he'll spit blood. Most people lie on the witness stand, because the greatest human illusion is that we can remember anything accurately. But if Scoot decides a person's basically telling the truth, he can figure out a way to make him doubt what he believes… sometimes doubt what he actually saw. In my court once in a rape case, he kept a poor woman on the stand for a solid week. When she got off, she was destroyed. It was the most masterful job I'd ever seen, because this woman had described the rape in minute detail. And to this day I believe she was telling the truth."
Young Warren had frowned. "Then why'd you let him go on at her for a whole week?"
"Because I was fascinated by what he was doing! He brought three briefcases into court — he knew everything there was to know about this woman's life from the day she was born until the day she took the stand. And he knew everything there was to know about the law on sexual assault. I kept saying, 'Stay away from that, Mr. Shepard, it's not relevant,' and five minutes later he'd be back. I'd interrupt, and he'd come back some other clever way. The prosecutor tried for a while to stop him, then he just sat there and took it up the culo. I wouldn't have given old Scoot a cut dog's chance in this case — and by God, he won an acquittal!"
His father's vision of the trial process made Warren uncomfortable. A battle, a joust between opposing counsel, where each v
ictory is sweet and each defeat adds zest to the next challenge. In law school Warren had understood that most trial lawyers yearned to win — and so did he. Cross-examination was the ultimate confrontation, the gunfight that left either lawyer or witness bleeding in the dust. The great trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes had once said, "I continue to dream of the day when I am examining a witness and my questions are so probing and so brilliant that the fellow blurts out that he, not my defendant, committed the foul murder. Then he will pitch forward into my arms, dead of a heart attack."
But there had to be more, Warren thought. More than adversaries and great actors, lawyers should be the standard-bearers of what was decent and fair. Should be, but rarely were: for they were born and shaped as human before they could be turned into lawyers.
===OO=OOO=OO===
The whites of Scoot's huge black eyes seemed more bloodshot than ever and beneath them were dark yellowish circles where the skin was drawn tight, as if he might have liver trouble or had undergone cosmetic surgery. He was probably sixty-five years old, but his hair was still full and black. Transplanted and dyed, Warren figured, but with flair, leaving small silver-gray wings above the ears.
Scoot lowered the can of Lone Star. "What do you know about the Dr. Ott case? And my client, Johnnie Faye Boudreau?"
Warren wondered for a moment why Scoot would want to discuss it with him. But he said, "Whatever I read in the Chronicle, and I was there in court when she pled poverty and you got the bail reduced to a hundred grand. And of course I remember the Underhill murder."
Between pulls at the can of beer and puffs on his cigarette, Scoot gave him a synopsis.
The victim, Clyde Ott, had been a successful Houston gynecologist. In his early thirties he had married one of his patients, Sharon Underhill, the forty-year-old widow of an oil-and-gas baron and the mother of two teenaged children. With Sharon's money Dr. Ott built the Houston Woman's Clinic, the Ott Clinic for alcoholics, the Underhill Clinic for drug addicts, and then a series of expensive retirement homes with small medical units attached. There was a waiting list to get into all of them.
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 6