Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller Read Free

believed that the law was meant to redress the imbalance wrought by human brute force, conniving, and wrongdoing. He had chosen criminal law.
    "Jesus Christ," he muttered to his wife. "Lay off, will you? I feel like shit already. I don't need to be told I should quit practicing my profession."
    "I didn't say that," she pointed out. But she backed off and let the matter drop.
    During the twelve months of official disgrace he reported once a month to his probation officer. Damned if I'll vegetate, Warren decided. I'll use the time to do things I always said I wanted to do. He worked as an occasional part-time investigator for another lawyer, an old friend named Rick Levine. He joined a gym and pumped iron. He took a cordon bleu cooking class.
    His office on Montrose was a single-story wood-frame white building, a converted residential cottage. Warren had started his career with a gang of young lawyers sharing a suite in a modern downtown building, but the sterility of the building outweighed the camaraderie. When he found the cottage, about a year before the Virgil Freer case, he moved in immediately. In that office, feet up on his desk, during the year of probation he read
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
most of Dostoyevski, some Faulkner, and books by Marilyn French and Betty Friedan in an effort to grasp how the world was changing. He studied
The Joy of Cooking
and Julia Child and made notes on a legal pad. In the summer he drove down to Mexico for a month and took a course in intensive Spanish at a little school called Interidiomas in the mountain town of San Miguel de Allende.
    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