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

tough enough: that, he realized, was what Charm had been trying to say. It could be that in this business you needed skin of leather and no heart. He remembered a Houston Oilers defensive tackle he had defended in a cocaine possession case some years ago. The football player said, "There's these rookies, see, at training camp? They show up on the field at seven in the morning to run laps and they work out until seven in the evening. Me, I show up at ten, leave at three. And they get cut, and I stay. They can't ever figure it out. See what I'm saying? They don't have it — whatever
it
is — and I do."
    Warren came to question whether he had it, whatever it was. But he also remembered William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech, where the old writer had said that our task was not merely to survive, but to prevail.
    I'll prevail, Warren vowed. And to prove to his peers and betters that one lapse in judgment had diminished neither his skills nor his respect for the law, he began hustling court appointments.
    Houston, alone among major cities, employed no public defender's office. If an accused claimed he was too poor to hire counsel, the judge would appoint a lawyer and order a legal fee paid out of public funds. Each morning at eight o'clock, hungry defense attorneys left their business cards on the bench at the judge's elbow, then crowded around the desks of the court coordinators who helped dispense the cases. Some lawyers, fresh out of law school, officed out of the courthouse basement cafeteria where the overhead was the price of an overcooked hamburger and a cup of weak coffee; they sought court-appointed work in order to gain experience. Older lawyers hustled for it when their collars were frayed and they smelled of stale tobacco.
    When he was younger, more brash, Warren likened the older lawyers to vultures waiting for dead meat. Now he was more forgiving. He was one of them.
    He did court-appointed work for two years. It was survival. He never went to trial: all the cases were plea-bargained. Warren once overheard a journeyman lawyer tell a judge, "You can pay me $300 and I'll plead this guy guilty and move it through real smooth, or you can get some other guy for $150 who'll fuck up your docket. Up to you, your honor." Warren spent his days haggling like a merchant in a North African bazaar. He dealt with drunken drivers, vagrants, addicts and small-time crack dealers, the trash of the streets and ghettos. The court dockets were jammed — sentences were handed down swiftly, often by rote. Most of the judges' stone-faced speeches were generated by computers. The prosecutors were impatient, ambitious. The price of mercy was time. And no one had time.
    Some days Warren wanted to smash his fists against the courtroom walls in frustration. I'm a trial lawyer, he thought bitterly, that's where I shine, that's what I love. For the sake of a son of a bitch like Virgil Freer I gave all that up. He grew depressed, moody. His face began to lose its youthful sparkle.
    But still in his daydreams, like a lover whose indifferent mistress is far away, he embraced the shadowy belief that if he kept working at it and did his best, he could somehow claw his way back to where he had been before he lied to save his client who was now doing thirty years at Huntsville prison for armed robbery and attempted murder of a police officer, and whose scruffy, scrapping, shallow-eyed children, for whom Warren had felt such pity, were thrown away on the common garbage heap of life. If I live long enough, he thought with a renewed burst of outrage and shame, one day I'll be plea-bargaining for them too.
     
     
     
    Rain beat on the roof, lightning crackled across the horizon. Behind each stroke the lightning left a wake of heated air that came to them as thunder. Charm Blackburn cried out softly and it woke Warren, who calmed her with whispers and touches until she subsided into uneasy sleep. The digital clock showed 3:30 A.M.: Friday, May 19, 1989. For a