Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (21 page)

In the late afternoon Warren visited Hector to make sure he had the proper clothing and to tell him how to conduct himself in the courtroom. Hector was grave and courteous. Now and then he tried to make polite conversation about life in jail, but it was an effort. Warren left there feeling depressed. This man could not have done it. He's innocent. And I have no way of proving it.

He went back to the office and again put his boots up on the desk. He stared at a blank part of the white wall, forcing his brain to work as hard as it could. He tried to make simple connections. He flew through the alternatives, then began again, working his way through them more deliberately, coldly, in mental slow motion. Silently the first time; then aloud, his voice barely above a whisper vibrating in his throat, as if it came from elsewhere. He stood up to look at himself in a mirror. His eyes looked calmly back at him in the fading light. They were not the eyes of a lunatic.

He sat down again at the desk, leaned his elbows on the comforting wood. Dusk fell. He stared at the HPD photograph. The second hand of his watch moved around and around the face, wearing away human time. If he hadn't made a glaring error of observation, if he hadn't thwarted logic in discarding the alternatives, if he dared to believe her car had collided with Dan Ho Trunh's Ford and there was some causal relationship between that event and his death — there still remained the questions of
why
and
how.

No connection, other than the rage she had shown in the office, and her nature, and Altschuler's accusation. And her brothers. But that was too farfetched.

Can I ask her? Cutely probe? Find out where she was that day, that evening? I have no reason to ask. But if she's innocent she won't know what I'm getting at and she'll tell me where she was — so I risk nothing. If she did it, she'll be evasive, maybe furious. I'll see it, I'll know the truth. And she'll see that I know. And that risks everything. I'll be finished as her lawyer and I won't have a nickel's worth of proof.

He looked at his watch: it was nearly eight o'clock. He gathered up his things and locked the office and drove back to Ravendale to change for the party with Maria Hahn.

A bearded man at least six-and-a-half feet tall clapped
Warren on the shoulder, yelling above the din, "So, little buddy, how come you're improperly dressed for this patriotic occasion?"

"Didn't know it was a costume party," Warren admitted.

"What?"

Warren yelled up, "I said, my sarong shrunk in the dryer!"

The bearded giant guffawed, then headed for the swimming pool on the lawn behind the house. Warren followed, en route snatching a piña colada off the bar.

It was his fourth since he and Maria Hahn had arrived at the Towering Texans' Fourth of July party, which was taking place in the home of a couple whose combined length stretched end to end, Warren had calculated, would be twelve feet five inches. The fifty large guests seemed to threaten the proportions of the house. Most of them had drifted to the back lawn and its limitless ceiling of starred July sky, where they could stretch their limbs and twirl their hips to the disco beat without fear of punching a hole in drywall.

Many of the tall people carried their drinks into the pool. No need to change clothes since the announced theme of the fiesta — bannered across the patio in computerized script (the host was a programmer for Compaq, but could not have worked on their speller utility) — was
SOUTH SEAS INDEPENDENSE.

"Fuck," Maria exclaimed, when she and Warren arrived and saw that everyone was wearing thongs, muu-muus, feathers, and garlands of shells, "how come I forgot all about that?"

"Denial," Warren said. "I know a lot about that."

"We'll get sloshed," Maria proposed, "and then we can strip down to our whatevers and jump into the pool and no one will give a damn, least of all you and me."

Warren reminded her that one of them still had to negotiate his car homeward over thirty minutes of freeway on a holiday night.

Maria laughed. "Relax, counselor. I'll make sure you get back in one piece."

Was that stodgy of him? To want to arrive at his bed alive? He didn't think so. Maria was an oddball, a quiet adventurer. Contemplating that thought, his mind lay open and unguarded for a moment, and an idea invaded him. He hesitated, but being a hair more drunk than he realized, he passed in a matter of moments from hesitation to determination. There was something he had to do. Not only could he do it tonight, he
had
to do it tonight: the necessity of it punished him like iodine on an open wound. Tomorrow might be too late. How had he missed it? Not grasped that urgency?

The buzz in his head was wonderfully liberating, yet he knew that if he downed one more of the frosted rum drinks he would be inoperative. He roused the hard edge of his mind. Make the call, then go. He set the drink down on a patio table and turned back to the house. His watch said 11:25 P.M.

There was a pink wall telephone in the bathroom. Sitting on the closed toilet seat, Warren punched out the number of Ecstasy, the club that Johnnie Faye claimed not to own. It rang five times before he heard the blare of sound and then the announced name of the club.

"MCI operator. Person-to-person from Corpus Christi for Johnnie Faye Boudreau, ma'am."

The five-second wait was shorter than he had predicted. She must have been in the back office.

"Yes? Mama, is it you? What's wrong?"

Warren broke the connection by jabbing the # button a few times and then depressing the wall hookup, hoping to simulate an operator cutoff.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Maria's wiggling feet and shapely calves dangled in the water of the pool; she was talking with two women in muu-muus. Warren caught her eye, and she excused herself to come flowing over to him. He had never really noticed how graceful she was. Other things were more obvious: that witchlike laugh, the barrage of scatology.

"I'm having a fine time," he said, "but I have to go somewhere else. Take care of something. I should have told you about it before. And I might need some help."

"Boy, you
are
mysterious," she exclaimed, as if she had suspected it before and now he had confirmed it.

"I need a lookout. And a witness. No questions asked."

"Just one, my weirdo friend, if you don't mind. You going to rob a bank?"

"Photograph a car."

Maria didn't cross-examine, seeming to prefer the poetry of the unknown to prosaic reality. That was fine with Warren. She was Dwight Bingham's court reporter.

Down the darkened street from the party house he unlocked the door to the BMW. "You have your camera with you?" she asked.

"No, I'll have to… oh, shit!" he howled. "Charm has the fucking camera!"

Maria quickly touched his forearm with the tips of cool fingers. "Take it easy. I have a camera. And a flash. And film. Just stop off at my place and I'll get it, and then we'll go wherever you need to go, do whatever you have to do."

===OO=OOO=OO===

Half an hour later, Maria had changed into thonged sandals and a loose cotton dress with a sash of multicolored Thai silk. She snapped open the back of her Pentax and slipped in a fresh roll of Kodacolor 200. It was twenty minutes past midnight. Warren headed west for the Richmond strip.

She closed her eyes and was silent until they were nearly there. He thought that she was asleep.

"Want to hear a joke?" Before he could reply, Maria said, "Why do politicians have one more brain cell than horses do?"

Riddles were her favorites, he guessed. He said that he didn't know why.

"So they won't shit on the street during parades."

He laughed politely, then spotted the lights of Ecstasy. Outside the club, the glow from overhead street lamps cut the shadows of the night that lay upon the parking lot. Warren eased the BMW into a slot on the outer concrete edge, in darkness, not far from a fast-food chicken franchise. In the illuminated doorway of the club under flickering red neon script, silhouettes appeared: black figures scissored from tin. A hum of laughter followed by a salvo of music broke from the door into the night. Then the door squeezed pneumatically shut. The laughter and music ebbed away to silence.

"This car you want to photograph—"

"I see it."

He had worried that the Mercedes would be parked too close to the front door of the club. But the car was in the second row, about six spaces from the front door. Johnnie Faye must have arrived late.

"You want to tell me now what it's all about?" Maria asked.

"I really don't."

She laughed. "What can I say? Okay. Anything I can do to help?"

"Show me how this flash works, sit tight, and keep the motor running."

"Jeez, this is like an old movie."

Warren smiled automatically, but his heart clenched and suddenly picked up cadence. He remembered those old movies she referred to, where, in the getaway scene, something always went wrong.

He knew where Johnnie Faye lived, although he had never visited her apartment. He could have gotten his photo there the next morning when surely she would be asleep. Not surely: probably. And the high-rise had a locked underground garage, so he would need an electronic clicker to get in or else gain access through the building. And there might be an attendant. Too risky. But tonight, he realized, was riskier. He would need more than the photograph, maybe even a chemical analysis. Be smart: hire a private investigator to do the job. He hesitated, impaled by a thin needle of intelligence.

"I like you, Mr. Blackburn," Maria said.

"How come?"

"I'm trying to figure that out. I suppose it's mostly chemistry. Look" — taking the camera from his hands, she seated the flash in the sprocket — "you set it for distance here. When you push this button and the red light shows, all systems are go." She tested it and there was a fast bright glow. "Now you can click away. Just make sure the little red mother goes back on."

"I've got it," he said, but his resolve was buckling.

If I wait for another day or hire someone else to do it, the car's liable to be repainted by then. That was how things happened. You knew you had to do something but you put it off for what seemed such a good reason — and then, with no warning, opportunity slithered away, other cautions intervened: it was too late.

Make a beginning. Do it now.

"Maria, I may need you to verify what I'm going to do. Watch me."

"My son yells that when he jumps off the diving board into the neighbor's pool."

Warren walked through the warm night air toward Ecstasy. Nothing furtive, he decided. Do this fast.

Maria saw it all. Saw Warren crouch and raise the Pentax as he reached the front of the light-colored Mercedes on the driver's side. Saw the thin little black man at the door of the club whose head swiveled toward Warren. Saw the man stare, then vanish. Heard the bass rock beat, then silence again.

Warren's back was to the club. He flicked the switch on the flash attachment and the red light popped on. Other cars blocked the gauzy glow of the parking-lot lamp. Peering through the camera's viewfinder, he found it more difficult than he had anticipated to focus the bull's-eye on the small blue scratch adorning the Mercedes' fender. He was sweating.

He clicked off one shot, noted with satisfaction the swift flood of white light, then moved left a pace and did it again.

How can I prove it was this car?
Her
car?

Back off, get all of it in frame. Then one more of the front license plate and the fender. An irrefutable sequence.

Maria heard the lunatic thump of music as the front door of the club opened and the thin black man and a taller white companion stepped out, bumping shoulders in their haste. Maria reached across to the driver's door and shoved it open. Twice, and loudly, she yelled Warren's name.

At fifteen feet Warren focused manually. He had nearly the whole car in frame, including the fender and the front plate. He pressed his eye once more against the viewfinder. The car went suddenly dark, obscured. Something tugged at the camera.

"What is this?"

Frank Sawyer, in the same black T-shirt and chinos that he had worn to the Astrodome, had one hand clamped around the Pentax lens. Lean and feral like a coyote, he confronted Warren. The dragon tattoo was flexing.

"The fuck you up to, counselor?"

The little black man had edged away. Trouble was for Sawyer to take care of. Sawyer stepped into the glow of the overhead lamp, his cold blue eyes austere, accusing, impeaching all possible innocence.

"Just doing my job, soldier," Warren said, and thought, that was pathetic. He had no excuses prepared. This was a job where if you failed, you failed utterly.

Muttering, Sawyer tried to yank the camera away, but the strap around Warren's neck prevented it. Warren felt himself being pulled forward awkwardly, and to stop that he shoved Sawyer in the center of the chest with a flat palm.

Dropping into a crouch, Sawyer hit Warren hard with a boxer's left hand, high on the face, between the cheekbone and ear. The knuckles drove deep into the nerve. The strap around his neck and Sawyer's grip on the lens kept Warren from falling to the concrete. But the world was darkening; he believed he was sinking to lightless depths a mile below the last glimmer of sun, drowning in an ooze of stupidity.

Frank Sawyer lowered him until he was prone, then tore the camera off his neck and smashed it onto the ground. He did that several times until the camera was reduced to junk.

Warren knew nothing of this: he heard distant crunches and spectral voices. His next awareness was of someone dragging him by the elbows. He was being lifted. There was an aroma of fruity perfume. He was crawling up into a soft seat. The seat was in his BMW. Maria's voice came from a hundred yards away in a mist.

"… it's okay, it's okay. For God's sake, take it easy…"

His mind and eyesight began to clear. Cool air washed over his cheeks. Maria Hahn was driving. They were on a boulevard, not a freeway. His head throbbed as if a drummer were using it for a martial beat. He made a major effort of will and stopped groaning.