"Madam Prosecutor, is the state ready for arraignment?"
"Yes, your honor." Those were Goodpaster's first words in chambers.
"The court will take a plea this coming Monday, June 12, at 9 A.M. Defense motions next Friday, June 16. State has a week to respond. How about a trial date? State ready?"
"The state can be ready in seven days," Goodpaster said.
"Too soon. But I have an open date on the docket for Wednesday, July 5, right after the holiday weekend. On July 21, that's a Friday, I go on vacation to Hawaii. That's the deal."
Warren jumped to his feet.
Voir dire — the questioning and selection of jurors — normally was done in groups of forty or sixty citizens at a time, depending upon the size of the courtroom. But in a capital murder trial, because the possibility of the death penalty existed, each juror was questioned individually. The process could take weeks.
"Judge Parker," he pleaded, "that's a gun to my head. Including voir dire, you're allowing less than three weeks for the whole case. And I've got only three weeks to prepare! In a capital murder case, that's nothing!"
"You're talking Chinese to a pack mule, counselor. My docket's full right through Thanksgiving. See for yourself." She tossed her open calendar book to his side of the desk. "You want a trial, voir dire begins on July 5. That's it."
Warren made himself calm down. He tried another tack. "Scoot Shepard and I are trying Boudreau on July 24. With all due deference, can't we do Quintana when you come back from your vacation?"
The judge stubbed out her cigarette and leaned back in her armchair. "Never mind that due deference bullshit. You don't defer to me at all, and you can be sure I won't to you. You're a goddam fool. I feel sorry for you."
She flicked her hand toward the door.
===OO=OOO=OO===
In Goodpaster's office — after she had settled behind her desk and dealt with an insistently ringing telephone, and after Warren had reflected for some minutes on the awful prospects ahead, for himself as well as for his client — he said, "You have a good memory, Madam Prosecutor?"
Her eyes narrowed. Sunlight filtering through the Venetian blinds accentuated her cheekbones. "I don't forget court appearances, if that's what you mean."
"I want you to remember everything that happened in there today. Make some notes if you have to."
"Why?"
"Just for the hell of it, Nancy," he said. "Just in case in the heat of battle I forget. Did you tell Mrs. Singh she shouldn't talk to me?"
"I wouldn't do a thing like that. I just told her she didn't have to if she didn't want to."
"Can I see the offense report now?"
"No."
"Didn't Parker tell you this was a whale in a barrel? What are you scared of?"
"I'm just keeping to the rules. I could have showed you the file if you were going to plead out. But you're not, so I can't. You know that. It's war now, not a game."
"I wonder what made me think it was a game," he said. "Fuck you."
Goodpaster managed a small smile. She was a prosecutor — she had heard those words often from defense attorneys. After the trial, prosecutor and defense attorney usually had a drink together and apologized for any expletives uttered in the heat of combat. And they always shook hands.
Warren rose to leave, then stopped at the door, turning again to face her. "You intend to do this for the rest of your life?"
"That might be a little tiring," Goodpaster said.
"You mean one day you'd like to be a defense attorney and make those big bucks. Be another Scoot Shepard."
Goodpaster shrugged. "I suppose so. That's the light at the end of the tunnel. Although sometimes, as you should know, the light at the end of the tunnel may be a train."
"That's good. Is that original?"
"I might have heard it somewhere, I can't remember."
"Work on your memory, Nancy," Warren said.
===OO=OOO=OO===
That evening, about an hour before Warren drove home, Scoot Shepard left his office in the Republic Bank Building and headed toward the Houstonian Club. On balance he was in a good mood — the jury had found his banker client not guilty of driving while intoxicated. As was his habit, Scoot had spent about ten minutes alone with the twelve men and women in the jury room to find out what had motivated their decision. "We didn't trust the police officer's judgment," the jury foreman explained, "after he made a mistake reciting the alphabet."
Scoot was meeting some cronies for an early session of bourbon and draw poker. Behind him, downtown office buildings were reflected in the mirrors of yet other facades. Ahead of him a veil of cirrus cloud was touched with the fire of a setting sun. He reached into the glove compartment of his Cadillac for a bottle of Maalox tablets. All day he'd been chewing, but his indigestion refused to go away. Neither would the headache at the base of his skull.
He had passed Allen Park and Buffalo Bayou and was on Memorial Drive heading west. Without warning — if you discounted the last two years of headaches and dizzy spells, and the admonitions of his wife and the nagging of his doctor — his eyesight blurred. The road went severely out of focus. Scoot felt only a jarring pain in his left temple, as if someone had jabbed him with a knuckle. He had suffered a slight stroke, caused by the occlusion of a blood vessel in the brain.
He was on a winding part of the drive flanked by colonial homes with clipped lawns, and at that moment the road changed from a right curve to a left curve. Scoot failed to see that. Just as the Cadillac hopped the curb, his instincts were good enough to force his foot onto the brake pedal, or he would have plowed up a lawn, knocked down the cast-iron statue of a black boy in hunting regalia, and smashed at forty miles an hour into the side of a two-story brick house.
The Cadillac veered, but there was still a leafy old pin oak in his path. Just as his bumper struck with a thunderclap and the grillwork wrapped itself around the trunk of the tree and the steering column began to fracture his chest, Scoot cried out desperately, "Oh, shit! They got me…"
What "they"? What furies? What avenging demons from courtrooms past? No one would ever know. No one would even know he said the words.
===OO=OOO=OO===
Driving home on the freeway, seeking out the lanes where traffic seemed to flow less jerkily, disconsolate over what had happened in Judge Parker's office and what it foretold for his client's trial, Warren felt a new refrain pounding in his head. I want my wife back. I need her, I need someone to talk to. I may be going off the deep end. There was no blame in his heart now, only soreness. He speculated yet again as to why she had been in tears when he came into the house. Had her New York lawyer given an ultimatum? Was she mourning her marriage? Was she feeling sorry for we? He had ached to ask but hadn't dared. She might have answered truthfully.
I want her back. I'm a country boy. We mate for life.
Alone at home, he mixed a vodka tonic at the wet bar. Six thirty-two on the wall clock. He switched on the TV in the family room.
There was Charm, ripening in color, blue eyes leveled at him, lips moving soundlessly, slim hands clasped together on the desk in front of the skyline backdrop. He punched up the volume a few clicks.
"… when we come back, we'll have the tragic story of a Sugar Land woman who gave birth to her second set of deformed triplets, and the weather, and sports, including the latest about the Astros from our ever-optimistic Don Benson. Please stay with us, friends."
Nice touches. She always seemed to mean what she said. He had understood Johnnie Faye in the Sports Bar. But it was Charm's choice, not his. He would have to listen and grasp and unburden. He couldn't keep all his depression of the last years locked out of sight. In the end, all he could do was tell her he loved her and forgave her, and wanted to try to be closer to her. He wondered if the New York lawyer was still in town. He tried to keep vulgar images from his mind, and of course the moment he fought against them they forced their way in. Think of anything but an elephant� that was a game they
had played as kids by the Shamrock pool. And you saw elephants everywhere.
He untied his slim file on the Quintana case.
Voir dire in three weeks. Lou Parker was within her rights: the law held that you had to be ready for trial thirty days after indictment, or ten days after the court took your plea. Usually the dockets were so crowded that the judges granted continuances even more automatically than they marched through their sentencing speeches. Once a date was set you could demand a postponement only if there was a missing witness who was crucial to the case. But you had to prove it. And he had no such witness.
He studied his notes from the visit to the Trunhs. Goodpaster in final argument would make the point that if robbery hadn't been the motive, what sense did the murder make? No one claimed that the murderer and the victim knew each other. My best chance, he thought, is to knock out the special circumstances — the theft of the wallet. If I can do that, then the jury might ask themselves why Hector would want to murder a man he didn't know. Not that a jury was required to consider motive — they were judges only of the facts: did Hector Quintana willingly and knowingly kill Dan Ho Trunh? But juries were not always rational, did not always follow the judge's orders. Maybe, if they believed there was no robbery, one or two of them would be uneasy on the question of motive. It took only one or two to hang up a jury. Or maybe they would find Hector guilty and then, when they had to decide on punishment, be lenient.
Two maybes. A human life depended on them.
Maybe Hector had done it. Drunk, unable to remember, blocking out the horror now because he couldn't believe it was possible. The thought was like a block of ice pressed unremittingly against Warren's spine.
On the TV screen he saw Scoot Shepard, doused in brilliant white halogen light, talking to reporters outside some courtroom. Smiling liberally yet elfishly, as Scoot always smiled. Surprised, Warren leaned forward from the couch. Had the state dropped the charge against Johnnie Faye for lack of evidence? But he quickly deduced that it was an old clip from the news file. Scoot was younger. Looked healthier.
Warren hit the mute button to regain the sound.
Voice-over, in her gravest tones, Charm said: "… so at the age of sixty-four, a great Texas lawyer is dead. The man who successfully defended sex doctor Martha Sachs, oil billionaire John R. Baker, and Mafia overlord Nick 'the Horse' Fellino could not defend himself against the twisting curves and late-afternoon sun of Memorial Drive. A preliminary medical report indicates that Mr. Shepard was driving while intoxicated and suffered a minor cerebral stroke just prior to the fatal accident. We'll have an update on Channel 26 Eleven O'Clock News. Don?"
"Tonight at the Astrodome," Don Benson said, "the stumbling Houston Astros will go with hard-luck pitcher Jim Clancy in an effort to salvage a win in the final game of the series with the New York Mets…"
Hard to believe, even harder to digest and accept. Warren punched over to the networks, but they also were doing weather and sports. He turned off the TV. The silence of the house fell like thunder about his ears.
Warren paced the room. Scoot, you poor bastard. He moaned aloud, surprising himself.
He hadn't spent enough time with Scoot to mourn him. But he had known him, respected him, even liked him. Death was so elusive: in the courthouse you dealt with the details and consequences of death but not the fact itself. As a boy Warren had wondered: if I die, what will I feel? But there won't be an I anymore. Nothing to feel. No point of view. As a man he wondered too. No answer came. He heard Scoot's drawling voice. No more, other than in memory.
And now the Ott case… the best shot of my life, gone. Gone with Scoot. He finished his drink and poured another one.
Johnnie Faye Boudreau would have to pick a new lawyer. One of the old dogs with plenty of experience and clout, although none of it would equal Scoot's. The chances of that lawyer's asking Warren to sit second chair were zero. They all had people they worked with. If Scoot's boys hadn't been tied up on the antitrust case, Warren thought, he never would have asked me in the first place.
When he was first starting out as a lawyer Warren had pinned two hand-lettered notes to the bulletin board above his desk. One said: Never assume. The other said: If you prepare, what you're worrying about won't happen — but something else always will. Over the years the sun had faded the slogans and finally he had crumpled them and thrown them out. I should have tattooed them on my wrists, he thought.
He waited up for Charm. In all his life, not since the first day his mother had left him at the schoolyard, he couldn't remember feeling this abandoned. He didn't eat, just drank more vodka tonics and finished what was left of a jar of salted peanuts. At midnight, a little dazed and brain-weary, he went to bed. He was almost asleep when the telephone rang. He snatched the receiver from the cradle and said, "Charm? Are you okay?"
But it was Johnnie Faye Boudreau. She sounded frightened; she was blubbering. Warren had trouble understanding her words. Finally he realized that she was at the club, and someone had been listening to the late news on a car radio and had just told her of the tragedy.
Warren heard laughter in the background. Johnnie Faye's voice rose in pitch. "What am I going to do?"
"You're going to calm down," Warren said firmly, "and in the next few days you're going to find a new lawyer to take the case. The judge will grant a postponement of the trial date, the new lawyer will have plenty of time to prepare. It will work out just fine. You have a good case. Any decent lawyer can win it, I promise you."
"I want Mr. Shepard!" she cried.
"That will be a little difficult," Warren said.
"Can I see you? Can I talk to you? I need your advice."
"Yes, of course."
"I mean now."
"I'll be at the club in twenty minutes."
In a garden restaurant near the courthouse, Warren lunched with Judge Dwight Bingham. Wandering through the heat, a breeze brought to their nostrils the fragrance of dog roses and star jasmine. Warren had come back from the Ecstasy club at three o'clock in the morning and had risen at six-thirty. He had gone to his office, where he read through the Boudreau case file and pored over law books and then called the court at 8 a.m., just a few minutes before the judge began his docket.
Bingham lifted a forkful of blackened catfish to his mouth. He had been born on a plantation near Texarkana and had worked ten years as a bailiff before he finished putting himself through law school. A long journey, and he had seen a great deal happen.
"It's you I'm worried about, young Warren. Bob Altschuler's an awfully good prosecutor. He'll run for judge in November. This is a big case, maybe his last big one. He'll fight like hell to win it."
"So will I," Warren said flatly.
"If you lose, you'll look bad. Especially after that affidavit thing that happened with you and Lou Parker."
"Old hat," Warren said.
But he knew it wasn't. He had ordered a creole fish salad, but he had no appetite. Nevertheless he toyed with the food, pretending to be involved with it.
"I can handle it," he said at last. "Scoot and I had three or four meetings and I have a copy of the full file. I'll try it just about the way he would. Look, Judge, the Boudreau woman thinks she wants me. That's what matters."
He hadn't asked her. He hadn't pressured. Last night at Ecstasy she had said at least four times, "I don't know what to do," and Warren had kept repeating that she didn't need to make a snap decision. She could ask around town — any lawyer would take the case. It was a good case, he stressed. She would only have to testify to the truth. Only a fool could lose such a case.
"You have faith in me?" Johnnie Faye asked.
Did he have faith in her? What an odd way to put it.
"If you told the truth to Scoot," Warren answered carefully, "and you keep on telling the truth to whomever you pick as your new lawyer, I have faith in your defense."
"Could you win my case?"
"Yes, I could."
"Would you win it?"
&
nbsp; "Yes."
"Mr. Shepard was the smartest lawyer in town," Johnnie Faye said, "may he rest in peace. He picked you to work with him, so you have to be good too. He told me more or less what happened to you a few years ago — he said you'd do anything for a client but you just went too far that time. He said you were one of the best young lawyers he knew of. Real smart, real quick, and you worked hard. I think you're smart too, except maybe in your love life. But I've noticed that a lot of very bright people aren't too bright when it comes to all that emotional stuff. Maybe they don't have time to think things through. If I asked you to take the case, would you?"
"Yes," Warren said.
"I want to get this over with. I don't want the trial postponed, it's hanging over my goddam head like a sword. I can't sleep nights. So let me think it over. I'm tired now. I don't know what to do."
"You'll do the right thing," Warren told her.
In the garden restaurant, Judge Bingham frowned and touched a cold glass of iced tea to his sagging cheeks. "Why don't you tell her to get someone like Myron Moore, and you sit second chair to Myron?"
"Because Myron is lazy. I can run rings around him. Come on, Judge. You know that."
"When will Ms. Boudreau give you an answer?"
"I'm meeting her again tonight at Ecstasy."
"I want to tell you something, Warren. Off the record." The old judge let out a soft sigh. His face seemed compounded of shiny brown lumps and sallow slack folds. "You quote me on this, I'll call you a liar. You were there that day in court, the hearing for reduction of Ms. Boudreau's bail. All that business about the Louisiana corporation owning that club, her having no money, that was bullshit. I knew it, couldn't prove it, didn't want to be bothered. That's a clever woman. Gets what she wants, twists people around. You watch yourself, son. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
"I haven't in years," Warren said truthfully.
He paid the bill over the judge's protests and left the restaurant. To defend Johnnie Faye Boudreau was literally the chance of a lifetime, like Rocky Balboa getting a shot at the heavyweight crown. But if Johnnie Faye said yes, Warren realized, he would be trying two murder cases back to back. The pressure would never let up, he would be spreading himself so thin that he might tear. He could win it all… or break even… or lose it all. Stand there, stricken, and bravely tell his more stricken clients, "Well, I did my best…"
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 12