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

Synopsis:

Following the stigma of an ethics probe, attorney Warren Blackburn gets another chance — to assist a famous lawyer in a scandalous murder trial. At about the same time he agrees to serve as public defender for a poor Hispanic accused of capital murder. Wife Charm is getting tired of their lifestyle and leaves. After the famous lawyer dies, Warren takes over the defense of J.F. Boudreau, the beautiful manager of a notorious topless club, accused of shooting her lover. (There are several other crimes, all related.) The author has crowded his narrative with colorful, down-and-dirty characters, including a feisty woman judge, a wino, a court reporter attracted to Warren, and, especially, Boudreau, who is steamy, resourceful, and unforgettable. The legal points are artfully presented, and the story is jet-propelled. Most readers will want to read this at one sitting. Highly recommended.

In Houston, Texas, in the early winter of 1985, a petty
thief named Virgil Freer devised a scheme to bilk the chain of Kmart stores. Using a bootleg electronic pricing gun, he drastically lowered the bar codes on such items as expensive fishing equipment and lawn mowers, bought the goods in one branch of Kmart and then returned them in other branches for a full refund. Like most crooks with a workable scam, Virgil Freer did it once too often. He was arrested, jailed.

Virgil was a small, wiry man with pale eyes and yellowed teeth, and skin that had the rubbery translucence of a jellyfish. He seemed beaten down by life, humbled, pitiable. A redneck who chewed tobacco, said "aw shucks" and "consarned," Virgil made inquiries around the Harris County Jail from the knowledgeable inmates.

"I need a real smart lawyer. A tough one. But I ain't got much money, so he'd better be on the young side. And a local boy's best."

He hired Warren Blackburn, twenty-nine years old, a criminal defense attorney toiling his way toward the top of his profession. Warren's father, the late Judge Eugene T. Blackburn, had been a
prot�g� of Lyndon Johnson, and on the bench had been known as Maximum Gene, a tribute to the penalties he meted out to offenders foolish enough to give up their right under Texas law to be sentenced by a jury.

Virgil heard that Warren Blackburn was cut from different cloth — a friend to the friendless, a battler for clemency — but that he was stubborn and he got things done.

On a cool January morning the young, dark-haired lawyer, wearing a leather
windbreaker and corduroys, sat opposite Virgil in one of the visitors' cubicles of the Harris County Jail. There was a persistent smell of meat loaf and disinfectant in the air. The jail housed more than thirty-five hundred men in tan jumpsuits and slippers without heels, and two hundred women in shapeless gray striped dresses, all either awaiting court proceedings or in a holding pattern prior to residence at the state prison complex up at Huntsville. The walls of the jail were painted yellow and some had claw marks in them.

Warren Blackburn said to Virgil, "If you're straight with me, Mr. Freer, I can help you. If you lie to me — well, hell, I've known enough liars so that one more won't crater me. It'll be your ass in the ditch, not mine."

Virgil liked this lawyer immediately. Confident, calm, wry in speech and keen of eye, he was not one of those fast-talking counselors who kept saying "Don't worry" and never quite bothered to explain the sharpened stakes and snares that lay ahead in the legal underbrush. A good ole boy, Virgil decided, with a college education. An honest man. The man I need.

"I swear I'll tell you God's truth about what-all you ask me," Virgil said. "But please, you got to spring me outa here right away or I'll go crazy. My wife's in the hospital with cancer. If I don't git back home, my kids'll starve."

Warren commiserated, probed, asked basic questions. "Virgil, do you have any prior convictions?"

Shamefacedly, Virgil admitted that some years ago up in Oklahoma he had been convicted for drunk driving and given six months' probation, and then later copped a plea for passing a few bad checks, with a sentence of ninety days in a county jail.

"That's just a little misdemeanor trash," Warren said, "so let's see what I can do."

They arranged a small fee.

Warren checked with Ben Taub Hospital and discovered that Freer had told the truth: his wife was about to be operated on for bone cancer. That saddened the young lawyer but it also made him feel he could trust his client's word. He put on a dark suit and went to the assistant district attorney who was prosecuting the case. The prosecutor slapped down on his metal desk a computer printout that listed the two prior convictions. He demanded $20,000 bail.

Warren shook his head mournfully. "Don't you want to be able to sleep nights? This is the man's first felony. His wife's in Ben Taub, he's got four little kids to support — you think he'll up and leave town? Give the poor bastard a break."

The prosecutor reluctantly agreed to $5000 bail. Using a bondsman who owed him a favor, Warren got Virgil Freer out of jail.

One windy evening Warren visited Freer outside of town, where the little man lived in a dilapidated mobile home with his four ragged, watery-eyed young children and several mongrel dogs. Virgil wore overalls and a red gimme cap with a CAT Diesel patch. He had a job as an auto mechanic; a buxom, slack-jawed young country woman named Belinda was taking care of the kids in the daytime. While the dogs snarled in the dust over some bones and the ragamuffin children whined and fought, Virgil pleaded with his new lawyer: "If I go to prison, there's no one to look after the little 'uns. The state'll throw them into one of them godawful homes! Mr. Blackburn, that'll kill my wife for sure. You're a married man, cain't you understand how I feel? You got to help me. I learned my lesson."

I've met a lot worse than Virgil, Warren decided. Using a pricing gun to steal from a Kmart was only a step above petty shoplifting and hardly rose to the level of armed robbery. Playing God, Warren decided that Virgil would never rape or kill anybody. He deserved a chance to go straight.

The case had fallen into Judge Louise Parker's 299th District Court. Lou Parker, as the judge called herself, was probably the most harsh and obdurate magistrate in the Harris County Courthouse. Warren kept plea-bargaining, delaying, hoping for a break. And he got one: Judge Parker's tough number-two prosecutor, who had been demanding seven years' pen time for Virgil Freer, suddenly jumped from the district attorney's office to private practice. He was replaced by a young black woman named Nancy Goodpaster, fresh out of Bates College of Law at the University of Houston. She was sincere and ambitious but overwhelmed by the crowded court docket.

In her small office piled high with papers and overflowing accordion files, Nancy Goodpaster and Warren began a fresh round of plea bargaining. "Freer's a first offender, isn't he?" the prosecutor inquired. She answered her own question: "I'm sure he is — I can't find any prior convictions in his file."

The computer printout citing Freer's Oklahoma misdemeanor convictions evidently was buried deep, perhaps lost. They didn't know!

A little startled, Warren changed the subject. "If we could come out of this with probation and a fine," he said, "we could live with it. The man's wife may die of cancer. He's got four little children to support. I'm not taking his word for it. I checked. He's never lied to me. Let me tell you, that's rare."

Nancy Goodpaster had heard around the courthouse that Warren was a scrupulous, trustworthy lawyer. She wilted, offering thirty days probated for a year, plus court costs and a $500 fine. A good deal.

Warren worried it over in his mind a while and then returned to Freer, who was biting his chipped fingernails on a back bench in the 299th.

His eyes were hard and stern. "Virgil, are you going to keep that job you've got?"

"Yes, sir."

"You going to get into trouble again?"

"Shoot, no!"

Warren looked as deep as he could into what he hoped was Virgil Freer's soul. In his three years of practice he had known his share of con men and criminals. Their gaze was either evasive or remarkably cool and straightforward. Freer's was neither; he had the harassed eyes of a simple, bedeviled man. Life had dealt him poor cards. An ugly little fellow, flawed but tenacious. And he had a good heart; he cared as well as he could for all those noisy bucktoothed children with their pale and violent eyes.

"You swear on the Bible and all that's holy, Virgil, and on the heads of your young 'uns, that you're going to stay out of trouble?"

"Yes, sir! I swear it!"

"Well, you better, because I'm putting
my
ass on the line for you." Warren explained the state's offer and said, "My advice is take it. Look after your kids and pray for your wife. Sign fast, Virgil, before I get religion and change my mind."

The paper to be signed was an affidavit in support of Virgil Freer's probation. Warren signed it too — or, as the law would have it, he knowingly executed the instrument. The affidavit stated that Freer had no prior convictions.

Warren's career proceeded along its steady upward track. He forgot about Virgil Freer until nine months later, one night on a highway north of the city, Freer was caught attempting to hijack a truckful of television sets. He was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. He exchanged six frenzied shots with the arresting officers before he was wounded in the leg and begged to surrender.

A zealous young Harris County assistant D.A. studied the full file and noticed there was something peculiar about Freer's last probation. He said to Virgil, "Look here, in this affidavit in the Kmart case last year, you swore you didn't have any priors. You lied, you scumbag."

"Yeah, but my lawyer told me to."

Warren, when he heard the charge, sank his head into the darkness of his cupped hands. He could bluff and say that Freer had never told him. But one more lie under such circumstances would be more than he could stomach.

That evening, at home, he told the tale to his wife, Charm, a young woman of slender grace and strong opinions. Under her maiden name, Charmian Kimball, she was a reporter for the local independent TV station. The Blackburns' house on Braes Bayou was a red brick rambler with a small backyard pool surrounded by banana trees. In the shadows, standing by the pool, Warren stared up at the silent and indifferent universe.

"I feel such a fool," he said. "I put my whole career in jeopardy for a man I knew I'd never see again."

"You thought he owed you something," his wife said quietly, with some reproach. "You forgot about human nature."

A few days later, from the district attorney's office, Warren learned that Virgil Freer's wife had died seven months ago. Large-breasted, slack-jawed Belinda had moved into the mobile home to share the lumpy bed. Virgil had sent his two oldest children to live with an alcoholic aunt in Fort Worth and committed the two youngest to a state-run institution that promised to arrange adoption.

Oh, my God, Warren thought. Where was my judgment? I've been around, I'm not a kid — how could I have been so wrong?

He was technically guilty of aggravated perjury, a felony, because the statement had been used in an official court proceeding. If convicted, he would be disbarred. But Maximum Gene had been popular with the gang over at 201 Fannin, the district attorney's office. Humiliated, disgusted with himself to a degree that no one at the courthouse fully realized, Warren arrived there with the pallid air of a penitent and managed to cut a deal: aggravated perjury reduced to a Class A misdemeanor, party to false swearing. The agreement was for one year's suspended sentence.

Wearing his most conservative gray suit, he pled before Judge Lou Parker, since hers was the court where the offense had taken place. In her black robes of authority, Judge Parker sat upright in her big leather chair behind the judicial bench, eyeglasses dangling from a gold chain that she fondled with stubby fingers. She had a mannish voice, a deep South Texas accent. She called Warren "a disgrace to the legal profession and a blot on our memory of your father, a distinguished jurist."

In the windowless fluorescent-lit eighth-floor courtroom that always smelled of ammonia with a veneer of sweat, young Nancy Goodpaster was awarded the pleasure of prosecuting and spelling out the plea.

But Judge Parker intoned, "Mr. Blackburn, before I'll consider the state's recommendation, I want to hear in your own words what you think you did wrong, and just why you think I shouldn't drop three years of pen time on your bowed head. And I don't want any namby-pamby standard b.s. like y'all always throw up at me when you're pleading for some lowlife dog who sold cocaine to children. Make an effort, counselor. You're supposed to be an officer of the court."