I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason Read Free Page A

from Colonial New Englanders, his parents were members of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution. When he was a boy of ten, the family moved out West and he commenced a long and distinguished career as atroublemaker. Erle was suspended from high school; got involved in prizefighting at a time it constituted a felony in California; was shipped off to law school in Indiana and took part in a bottle-smashing incident in the dorm; ducked the cops trying to serve the warrant; took a train to Chicago, then Oregon, then California; apprenticed himself to an Oxnard lawyer who needed help with his two-bit cases; fleeced the D.A. with his legendary ingenuity; and wound up the lawyer of choice in Ventura County, “of all classes except the upper and middle classes,” as he once so winningly put it. To make some extra money, he started writing for the pulps. The rest, as they say, is history.
    It was thrilling stuff, admittedly, but the bad-boy antics took you only so far. I needed to humanize him, and the key, I had finally decided, lay not in Gardner’s writing per se, but in the Court of Last Resort.
    Let me explain. With the success of Perry Mason, Gardner had become a magnet for hopeless cases. The letters poured in from prisons nationwide. And every last one of Gardner’s pen pals claimed to be innocent: framed by an ex-lover, tripped up by circumstantial evidence, victimized by a prison grapevine. In every single case, the jury had been biased, the D.A. up for reelection, the judge senile, whatever. Gardner was a sympathetic ear, having firsthand experience with the fallibility of the legal system and a weakness for the underdog.
    And so, in 1948, he conceived of the Court of Last Resort. Its sole purpose was to persuade the authorities to reopen criminal cases in which men and women had been wrongly convicted of capital offenses. Gardner put together a panel of volunteer experts in various aspects of criminology whoreexamined case files, performed polygraphs, and interviewed witnesses, looking for flaws in the evidence. Over the period of a decade or so, he wrote seventy-five articles for Argosy magazine in which he described the process and put his findings before the public, whom he deemed the ultimate Court of Last Resort.
    In April I had taken a research trip to the University of Texas in Austin, where the Erle Stanley Gardner archive is maintained (unbelievably, nobody in California thought to ask until it was too late). The archive was a beautiful thing to behold. Gardner was a stickler about correspondence and kept every last shred, which was not a problem given that his convoy of secretaries was made up of legendary organizational fiends.
    For an entire week I focused on the Court of Last Resort. I had a jolly old time going through the “heartbreak files,” Gardner’s term for each prisoner’s correspondence, trial transcripts, parole board reports, and so on, being extra careful not to spill the coffee I smuggled daily into the fourth-floor library. They made good coffee out there in Texas. Nice and strong. As for the barbecue, no thank you. Too sweet. North Carolina barbecue, now that’s the real deal.
    Anyway, it wasn’t working. The whole thing. I wasn’t getting much more of a sense of Erle Stanley Gardner. Not until that magic moment when I stumbled across a dog-eared letter from 1958, handwritten on lined paper. It caught my eye because it had been misfiled, and Gardner’s team of obsessive-compulsives just didn’t make those kinds of mistakes. Then I read it. It had been written by a man recently convicted of killing his wife. And I read it again.
    May 12, 1958
    Dear Mr. Erle Stanley Gardner,
    You do not know me, but you did know my grandfather, William Albacco of Ventura, California. You represented him briefly in the fall of 1916, when he was accused in an assault case. He was innocent, and you got him off. Thank you. My grandmother always spoke