Hector blinked a few times.
"I know you didn't do it," Warren said.
Hector nodded in silence. Cold comfort, Warren realized, on your way to prison or death row. But it was all that Warren could offer.
===OO=OOO=OO===
In the midst of voir dire he had taken Maria Hahn to an Italian restaurant for dinner. "I haven't done anything about replacing the camera, but I will. I promise. I'm not quite with it these days. I'm feeling a little crazy."
Maria waved her hand in dismissal, rosy fingernails glittering in candlelight. Later, outside the restaurant, Warren kissed her on the cheek fraternally and said good night.
Two days after that, at noon, he bumped into her in a crowded courthouse elevator. She clasped his arm. "You look awful," she whispered. "I'll buy you lunch. Cheer you up."
Nothing dark or desperate or depressing about lovely Maria Hahn. She could pick her affairs, if that's how she wanted to play the game. Then what did she want from him? Friendship? Company? What he wanted too. A perfect match for this macabre season of his thirty-fifth year. If his loins stirred, he had that under control. But he sensed a naivet� in his thinking. "Independence," Charm had once said, "is an unnatural state for any woman with intelligence and normal DNA."
A day at a time in this too. Don't say anything you don't mean. If you don't know what you mean, then shut up. That seemed a decent enough formula for survival when your wife was divorcing you and you were swimming upstream to save the life of a client you knew beyond all doubt was innocent.
He reached for the check at lunch. "I invited you," Maria reminded him.
"Too late."
"I want my Pentax."
"Give me until Friday night."
"It's a date — I'll take you to dinner. And leave your money at home."
The Quintana jury was picked and sworn by Thursday. It comprised seven men and five women: seven were white, five were black, half were under thirty. Warren was guardedly pleased, but he knew that from the moment a jury is sworn it becomes a new creature with its own separate life.
Judge Parker instructed the jurors not to discuss the case among themselves or even with family, and to be in court by 8:30 A.M. Monday.
The next day Warren stopped at a discount camera store and bought the Pentax, then lugged his heavy briefcase up to Arthur Franklin's law firm on the thirtieth floor of the Texas Commerce Tower. Charm's lawyer was in his sixties, a man with a smooth face and clear eyes, dressed in a gray suit, blue chalk-striped shirt, red power tie: a Texan who had gone to Harvard. His office smelled of wood polish, Havana cigars, and tax-free bonds. Maybe, Warren thought, I should have gone into civil law. I'd be bored, but I wouldn't lose so fucking much sleep. I wouldn't have to deal with murderers and scumbags and accused innocent men.
"You're an attorney, Mr. Blackburn. You know these matters are never pleasant, but they needn't be acrimonious." Arthur Franklin followed with the short form of the standard divorce lawyer's speech. In the end Warren agreed to all of Charm's terms. There was nothing to argue about. But he felt rotten all over again. A part of his life was ending. Had ended. In the elevator he shook his head, bewildered. A woman in the elevator looked at him, then took a defensive step backward. Warren realized he had clenched his fists and his lips were drawn back in a silent snarl.
No fucking wonder.
He went home to shower and feed Oobie, and at eight o'clock he met Maria Hahn at a French restaurant in River Oaks. Warren looked at the menu and said, "Do you mind if I ask you something gauche? Can you afford this?"
"Sure," Maria said. "Not all the time, but life is short."
She was paid a salary for her normal day in Judge Bingham's court, she explained, but by the page for extra work. She did best when there were appeals that required the entire record, or big cases with well-heeled clients like drug dealers whose lawyers requested day-by-day expedited transcripts of testimony. She had a second stenograph machine at home in her spare bedroom. Sometimes she worked until midnight. "The kid has to go to college one day. He says he wants to be a doctor, and you know what that costs since Reagan fucked up the scholarship program. Randy's a smart boy. I was thinking of the Ivy League. Penn or Cornell."
"A little early for that, isn't it?"
"You have to plan ahead."
"My wife went to Penn," Warren said.
Maria smiled easily. "Good for her."
After espresso, the restaurant offered a snifter of Remy Martin to honor the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day. Warren lifted his glass. "To independence."
Maria paid the bill with a Visa card and said, "Let's have the other half at my house. I own a whole bottle of Courvoisier. We'll celebrate the revolution the way the French do."
She lived nearby in an English Tudor condo tucked behind Westheimer, just inside the Loop. Following her there in his car, Warren came to the conclusion that it would have been churlish and unfriendly to say no. Just one drink. All the way there he thought about Hector Quintana and Johnnie Faye Boudreau.
Maria's son was spending a month with his grandparents over in Austin. Maria put some Spanish guitar music on the tape deck, turned the volume low, kicked off her shoes, then dropped down next to Warren on the living room sofa. The room was cool and lighted with the discreet glow of two table lamps. The drink warmed him, the sofa was soft; like any stray, his response to these comforts was instantaneous. Extracting the half-finished glass of cognac from his hands, Maria set it on the coffee table. Her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack. She leaned toward him and kissed him. He was taken by surprise — but not really. He had seen it coming. Just one kiss.
But the kiss continued and Warren enjoyed it beyond expectation. She was a beautiful woman, he believed. He had always admired her oddly tilted Modigliani neck. The veins of its slender arch pulsed under his fingertips. He began to kiss it, running his lips from top to bottom and then up again, touching all its quadrants while she shuddered against him. She wore no bra, and he could feel that her breasts were round, soft but growing firmer against his chest. From beyond expectation he moved to beyond reason. Still…
"Maria—"
"Oh, shut up," she said quietly. "I promise it won't hurt. Let's just do it."
===OO=OOO=OO===
Warren left her condo at six o'clock on Saturday morning and drove to Ravendale, where he fetched his briefcase and Oobie and a sack of dog food. He drove back quickly on the empty freeway. From beyond reason he had passed to a state that was beyond control. Maria's bed was queen-sized, with half a dozen plump down pillows in frilled, peach-colored pillowcases. He had wondered if he would have a problem, if Charm would intrude. He had wondered too if Maria had wondered.
"Let's just fuck till we're dead," Maria said.
Stop wondering. This woman is accommodating, and her body is warm. She's lighthearted and alive. And today, for a change, so am I.
They stayed in bed most of the day with the blinds drawn, the cool air blowing. He could not remember when he had made love with this kind of energy and uncomplicated wantonness. He gave the credit to Maria, but he was pleased with himself. What traps life springs on us. And what pleasure it offers when we don't think too much, don't deny and don't lie.
In the late afternoon, when he took Oobie for a run, Maria went out to rent videos of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring. Warren had never seen either movie. For Maria it was the third time. Nevertheless, tears sprang to her eyes on and off during the four hours.
"Let's not go out again," she decided. "Let's hide our watches and the clock."
She called a nearby mall to order a pizza and two cold six-packs. During the night she slept against his back, leaving a cool layer of sweat from shoulder blades to thighs. There were pizza crumbs under the pillows.
On Sunday morning she brought trays of eggs benedict and cappuccino to the bed. "My culinary specialty," she said.
"I know what your real specialty is, Hahn."
"No, Blackburn, you don't."
>
In mid-morning, when he propped himself up against the pillows and tried to work his way yet again through the Quintana file, she showed him. Later he asked, "Have you got anything to read?" She admitted she was in the middle of a novel by Jackie Collins — it lay on the carpet beside the bed. While she clutched it to her flushed face, heaving cries that made Oobie rush in from the kitchen in alarm, as if firecrackers had gone off, Warren returned the favor.
When it began to grow dark he slipped out from under the sheet and pulled his watch from the bureau drawer. Feeling wonderfully decadent, drained, boneless, he dressed slowly. Maria announced that she was going to stay there in bed. Sleep till morning.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
She had resurrected his cock, he explained. He had thought all desire, all sense of pleasure, was dead.
"Are you telling me," she said, "that the cock leads the man?"
"No, but it's nice to have it along on the journey."
"Get out, you lawyer." She waved at him as he moved toward the door.
At home he studied the state's order of proof in Quintana, then his own witness list. The time with Maria faded from his mind. It had been a dream. He was back into the nightmare. And on the following morning, a hazy day with some thunderheads lurking on the horizon toward the Gulf of Mexico, and with the temperature registering 94 degrees on the thermometer outside the courthouse, he began the first trial.
The bailiff led Hector Quintana out of the holding cell. On one of its azure-painted walls a prisoner had scrawled "The Blue Room of Doom," and in another handwriting someone had printed "Parker's Court of Western Justice." Judge Lou Parker refused to allow the graffiti to be scrubbed off.
Wearing the austere jet-black robes of absolute authority, her hair glittering more iron-gray than brown in the light of banked fluorescent tubes, Judge Parker peered down from the height of the judicial bench. She nodded in the direction of Nancy Goodpaster. "You may call your first witness, Madam Prosecutor."
"The state calls Khuong Nguyen."
A slightly built man in his fifties seated himself in the witness chair. He was dressed in a pale gray silk sport jacket, white shirt, Countess Mara black tie with red polka dots, and perfectly creased dark gray trousers. He could have been a Saigon banker or a professor of Oriental philosophy at Rice University. He identified himself, however, as the owner of the 7-Eleven near the corner of Westheimer and Kirby in River Oaks. He had contracted for the franchise last November upon arriving in Houston. When he took over the 7-Eleven, the defendant, Hector Quintana, had been employed for about three months by the previous owner as stock clerk and general handyman.
Goodpaster asked, "Did the previous owner make any recommendation to you regarding Mr. Quintana, sir?"
"Objection," Warren said. "Calls for hearsay."
"Sustained. Try rephrasing the question, Madam Prosecutor."
"Thank you, your honor. Mr. Nguyen, what was your feeling about the defendant after you'd spoken to the previous owner?"
"I still object," Warren said. "The answer will depend on hearsay, on a statement made out of court. The previous owner's not here to say yea or nay."
"Don't explain hearsay to me, Mr. Blackburn!" Judge Parker glared down, then shifted her gaze to Goodpaster. "Well?"
"Your honor," Goodpaster said, "it goes to Mr. Nguyen's state of mind at the time. We're not claiming any truth to what the other owner may have said. We're leading up to show motive."
Warren said stubbornly, "It's not relevant, it's prejudicial, and it's not admissible."
"I'll allow the witness to answer." Parker turned to the jury. "You're not to believe or disbelieve any remarks attributed to the previous owner. Just pay attention to the reaction of the witness at the time."
In a cultured voice with a slightly French accent, Mr. Nguyen said, "I was told that Hector Quintana was a good worker but, shall we say, not entirely reliable. That on several occasions, during working hours, he had perhaps been intoxicated."
Goodpaster asked, "And as a result of being told that, Mr. Nguyen, what did you do?"
"I was forced to let him go."
Warren jumped to his feet. "Your honor, I object to this entire line of questioning. What's it got to do directly with the crime? It's leading to an attempt to prejudice the jury. I ask that all of it be stricken and the jury instructed to disregard."
"Overruled," Judge Parker said, "and sit down, Mr. Blackburn. Objections don't carry any more weight if you make them standing up. I told you a long time ago not to play to the peanut gallery."
So that's how it was going to be. Warren had assumed the worst. The worst was happening.
Goodpaster resumed: "Did you give Mr. Quintana any severance pay?"
"A week's wages. One hundred and ten dollars, my records show."
"And did you have words with him?"
"He seemed upset, and I got the impression—"
"No," Goodpaster interrupted, "don't give us your impressions. Just tell us what you said to him and what he said to you."
Warren could see that the jury reacted favorably. Goodpaster was being tough on her own witnesses. A nice touch. She was good.
Mr. Nguyen, a subtle gentleman, appeared to be annoyed at the rebuke. He obviously preferred to convey impressions. He wrinkled his forehead and stroked his tie with a pointed fingernail.
"I said to him, 'I'm so sorry, but I must let you go,' and I gave him the money. And he said, 'That's not fair.' I believe I then repeated that I was sorry."
"And what did Mr. Quintana do?"
"He became angry and spoke in an intimidating manner. Then, just before he left, he cursed at me."
"You understood he was cursing at you?"
"It was very clear."
"Thank you, Mr. Nguyen. Pass the witness."
Warren conferred in whispers for a minute with Hector before he rose. This was the part some lawyers reveled in. Tear the witness a new asshole, they said. Warren's general idea was somewhat less brutal: plant a slim needle of doubt in the witness's credibility, and keep doing it with each witness until the accumulated effect created a painful suspicion in the jurors that something was awry, that the prosecution had somehow been carried away with the passion to prosecute for prosecution's sake. It was not altruism on Warren's part, it was a belief that at the outset of a trial jurors tended to identify with civilian witnesses; they could quickly form a resentment against a belligerent defense attorney.
On Hector's behalf, however, he decided to bare his claws at least halfway. He stepped forward into the well of the courtroom, at a midpoint between the counsel tables and the judge's bench.
"Mr. Nguyen, you mentioned that the previous owner told you Hector was a good worker, but he drank now and then on the job. No — a couple of times he'd been perhaps intoxicated,' that's what you said. Nevertheless, the previous owner thought enough of him as an employee not to fire him, isn't that so?"
"It would seem so," Mr. Nguyen said carefully.
"Sir, before you moved here, where did you live?"
"In Singapore. And before that, Saigon."
"How many languages do you speak?"
"Five, to different degrees of fluency. Vietnamese, of course — English, French, and Thai. And some Chinese, the Mandarin dialect." He offered a modest smile.
"But you don't speak Spanish, isn't that so?"
"I have not had the opportunity to learn."
"And when Mr. Quintana supposedly cursed at you, it was in Spanish, isn't that so?"
Mr. Nguyen frowned. "As I said, it was clear."
"Sir, excuse me, but I didn't ask you if it was clear or not, did I?"
"No, but—"
"Please, Mr. Nguyen! I asked you if Mr. Quintana cursed at you in Spanish, didn't I?"
"Yes, I suppose you did."
"You know the answer to that question, don't you?"
"Yes." Nguyen twisted in the witness chair and glanced up at the judge.
Warr
en said, "Would you do the jurors and me the courtesy of looking at me, not at the judge, and answering the question that was put to you? Did Mr. Quintana curse at you in Spanish?"
"I seem to recall that was so."
Warren's voice rose angrily. "Did you understand one word Mr. Quintana said?"
"Some few words," Nguyen said, trying to save face.
"Oh?" Warren gambled. "Repeat them to the jury, please."
"I do not remember them," Nguyen said.
"No further questions, your honor."
===OO=OOO=OO===
The next witness, Rona M. Morrison — a pale, nervous woman in her late forties — was sworn in. She seemed to project: why am I here? I didn't do anything wrong.
Prompted by Nancy Goodpaster, she related that at about a quarter past eight on the night of May 19 she had delivered some skirts and cotton sweaters to the dry-cleaning establishment on Wesleyan, and on the way back to her car had "just kind of peeked into this station wagon was settin' there." And there was a man on the seat who "looked real dead."
"What did you do then?" Goodpaster asked.
"Yelled, I s'pose. Then this lady came out of the dry cleaners."
Goodpaster had some crime scene photographs stamped by the clerk and formally introduced into evidence, and then handed them to the witness.
"Is this what you saw, Ms. Morrison?"
Rona Morrison nodded, then began to leak tears.
Warren scowled. A weeper was always a bonanza for the prosecution.
"Ms. Morrison," Judge Parker said, stabbing out her cigarette in a big green glass ashtray, "my court reporter doesn't have a nod button. So would you kindly compose yourself and then answer yes or no."
Yes, that's what Morrison had seen. Goodpaster passed the photographs to the jury. Let them dwell on the face painted with blood, the staring eyes.
Warren took over for cross-examination. There was nothing of value he could learn, but it was an opportunity to get the jury to understand that he wasn't out to savage truthful witnesses.
"Ms. Morrison, this is painful for you, isn't it?"
Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Page 19