Defense, page 14
The restaurant was jammed. At the bar in the front, people were standing three deep, waiting for a table. The air was becoming close and the noise was making it difficult to hear; sometimes we had to repeat what we said.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want you to tell me about any of that. I don’t want you to tell me what you did or didn’t do with your late, lamented husband. What I want you to tell me about is your daughter. What did he do to her? And what did you know about it?”
I drank some more wine, and kept my eyes fixed on hers.
“Michelle told you that he raped her. You told me that. And you told me that he said he’d kill you both if you ever told. Now why don’t you tell me the whole truth?”
I was becoming agitated and I did not quite know why. I took another drink, trying to get myself back under control, but it only made it worse. I leaned as close to her as I could. “Yeah, Denise,” I hissed, “why don’t you tell me the whole goddamn truth!?”
She pulled back and glared at me with a derisive, soulless smile.
“You want the truth, the ‘whole goddamn truth’? See if you can handle it! Yeah, I knew Johnny was screwing her, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. He would have killed me. You know how many times he beat me up? How many times he beat the shit out of me? I think he liked it better than sex!”
A corrosive grin spread across her face, destroying the last pretense of innocence.
“I didn’t do anything about what he was doing to her. But let me tell you something else. She didn’t want me to! She liked it!”
She saw the shock register in my eyes.
“You don’t believe that, do you? Well, it’s true. She liked to screw. Why wouldn’t she? I was doing it when I was twelve, and I liked it. Everybody likes to fuck. Or didn’t you know that?” she asked with a crude, condescending laugh. “Maybe you’re one of those guys who screws anything he can find because you’re still looking for a woman who really knows how to do it!
“Well, let me tell you, Michelle liked it, liked it a lot. The only reason she told the cops anything is because Johnny—that dumb bastard!—got a little rough with her, and because she got pissed off when he made her go back to school. She still wouldn’t have said anything if the cops hadn’t taken her away that time they came to stop the stupid prick from beating me to death!”
It was gone. The veneer of decent feelings and civilized behavior had vanished. Right and wrong, good and evil, had no more meaning for her than the written word had for someone who had never learned to read. Indiscriminate promiscuity and random acts of violence, the state of nature that existed before civilization came into being, and that still exists wherever human beings follow the impulses of passion instead of the rules of reason, were for her the meaning and measure of existence. She knew how to use sex, and her murdered husband had understood violence. It was, she was certain, the only knowledge worth having.
She realized at once the gravity of her mistake. “I don’t really believe that,” she said, seizing on the first excuse that entered her mind. “I don’t. I really don’t. It’s just that he made me do so many awful things, told me so many awful things—about Michelle, even—I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t.” A deliberate tear etched its way down her rose-colored cheek.
I leaned back and folded my arms across my chest. I stared at her and said nothing.
“I knew he was having sex with her. I knew it. I begged him to stop. I did! Really! But he wouldn’t stop. I begged him, begged him not to. And all he did was beat me up again.”
She dried her eyes and with convincing insincerity told me how much she needed me. “No one believes me. I didn’t kill him. But everybody says I did it. You have to help me. I’ll do anything you want. I know you represented Johnny for nothing. I’m not asking you to do that. I can pay you whatever you want.”
It was ludicrous. She was sitting there in a borrowed dress still insisting she could hire me to defend her on a murder charge. Then it hit me, the question I should have asked right at the beginning. “How did you make bail?”
She had not expected the question. She played for time. “Oh, that. I have friends who are willing to help.”
“And these same friends, I assume, are willing to pay for your defense?”
She did not want to talk about it. “I can get whatever it costs to pay you,” she said impatiently. “That’s all you need to know.”
“I don’t need the money,” I shrugged.
No one believes more fervently that money is power than those who have never had it. She thought it was the opening gambit in a negotiation.
“I mean it. I can get you whatever you want.”
I smiled. “I don’t take cases because of the money. I only take the cases I find interesting.”
“And you don’t find anything interesting about my case?” she asked, trying, and failing, to conceal her annoyance. “Not even the fact that I didn’t do it!?”
“I’ve been listening to you change your story for what? An hour and a half, two hours? And the more I listen, the more I doubt you’ll ever tell me the truth. So if you think I’m going to believe you just because you say so, you’re out of your mind.”
People around us were beginning to look. “All right, all right,” she said, trying to calm me down. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the truth. But you’re not going to believe me.”
“Try me.”
“I lied to you. That’s true. I lied to the police. I lied to everyone. I didn’t go out that night. I didn’t come home and find him dead. I never left. I don’t know what happened. I was asleep, and when I woke up he was there, laying against the wall, staring straight ahead, that stupid look on his face. He was dead, and I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? Call the cops? They were going to believe me? So I got out of there. I took the gun. It was a mistake. But I was scared. I thought whoever killed Johnny might decide to come back and do me next. I don’t know why they killed him. Could have been drugs. I don’t know. So I took the gun and the money and I took off.”
“That’s the truth?”
“Yes, it is. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“You’re sure that’s the truth?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“So what you’re telling me is that he’s shot right there, in your bedroom, not more than what—seven or eight feet—from where you’re sleeping, and you didn’t discover the body until you woke up the next morning?”
For a moment, she searched my eyes, trying to understand what she had missed. Then it came to her. “I can sleep through anything! Anything! Especially when—”
“Especially when what!? When you’re all strung out!? You were lying in bed, passed out cold, and someone came in and blew him away. And you didn’t hear a goddamn thing because you were too goddamn stoned! Is that it!?”
She was staring at me, spellbound, as if she had lost the power of speech.
“Yes,” she mumbled finally. “You’re right. I got high that night. And I passed out.”
“What were you on?”
“I don’t remember.”
I believed her when she told me she did not remember. And I believed her when she told me that she had been there, passed out on the same bed where her husband had raped her daughter, when someone killed Johnny Morel. She was too gifted a liar to make up anything so improbable.
“Do you believe me? Do you believe that I didn’t do it?”
“Yes, I do.”
Her eyes brightened and her voice grew confident. “Then you’ll do it? You’ll be my lawyer?”
I paid the check, finished the little that was left in my glass, and stood up.
“No, I won’t take your case. I never take a case I have no chance of winning.”
xii
She had offered me money and she had offered me sex, and when they did not work, Denise Morel had even tried to tell the truth. Of all the things she had said, it was the only thing I believed, and after I told her what a jury would do with it, the only thing she would never tell anyone again. There had been a certain small satisfaction in taking her down the path of each lie until she stood at the edge of the abyss from where she could stare down at the destruction that waited below, a shadow of her own duplicity. But whether I had been trying to extract some measure of revenge for what she had done years before, or for what her unexpected reappearance had reminded me of about myself, was a question I did not then think to ask and cannot begin to answer even now.
The evening with Denise Morel had been a short, temporary distraction from what had been the tedious, time-consuming preparation for one of the most complicated conspiracy cases I had ever taken to trial. There were six defendants and six lawyers. We were going to be crowded around a counsel table like the participants in an alleyway crap game. Worse yet, the case was being tried in federal district court where judges conducted voir dire and where the rules of evidence were sometimes enforced even when the other side did not raise an objection. Federal judges were smart, tough, and ran their courtrooms the way Captain Bligh ran his ship. There was no latitude for error.
All six defendants were Russian immigrants and all of them had been willing participants in a stolen-car ring. My client, Sergie Belnikov, had perfected the fine art of removing and replacing vehicle identification numbers while living under the constant surveillance of the KGB. He was a genius at it, or so he had claimed at a video-taped meeting with a federal undercover officer. The government offered him a deal. If he pled guilty he would do twelve months in a minimum-security facility and he would not be deported. The offer was too good to turn down, but he would not even discuss it. He was outraged at the way he had been treated by the American government. The KGB, he insisted with something like nostalgia, had never lied to him. When I told him he could end up doing six years, he laughed. He had done time in the Soviet Union. “Your prisons,” he said with a sly wink, “are better than most Russian hotels. Besides, I’m not going to prison. I am not guilty. Don’t worry. We going to win.”
And we did. The government showed its tape and Sergie smiled and nodded through the whole thing. We had no defense. It is difficult to argue entrapment when the defendant is captured on film begging for the chance to commit the crime and bragging about how often he has done it before. All we had was Sergie himself, but that was enough. He broke down in tears as he described how he had once thumbed his nose at the Communists by stealing a car that belonged to a member of the presidium and then used the money he made from it to feed his family and help out his neighbor. Sergie was the Russian Robin Hood. Twenty minutes into his testimony and the members of that jury would have started to wave the flag if they had had one within reach. Then, when he described the way he finally got himself and his family out through a long circular route that took them first to Turkey, then Israel, and finally to America, they were ready to applaud. He arrived in Portland with no friends, no money, nowhere to live, and only a few words of English. He managed to get work as a janitor, but it lasted less than three months. He tried to find something else, anything to make enough money so they could live. Then someone told him he could make money—a lot of money—doing what he used to do. He only did it to feed his family. He did not think it was right for the government to offer people who had nothing the chance to commit crimes.
The jury agreed. All of the others were convicted, but Sergie Belnikov was found not guilty. The only person who was not astonished was Sergie himself. In addition to my fee, which he paid in cash, he offered to get me a new car. “A Mercedes, a Jaguar, anything you want, even a Ferrari. I can have it for you in a couple of days,” he said with a proud grin.
Horace Woolner thought it was funny. “The guy actually offered to get you a car? Right after he got acquitted? Unbelievable! Those Russians are all nuts,” he laughed. “Dangerous, but certifiable.”
We were driving across town, just the two of us, a couple of middle-aged men dressed in tuxedos. I had just picked him up in front of his high-rise condominium down by the river. “You know, Horace,” I said as I waited for a light to change, “don’t take this too personally, but you’re not really the best-looking date I’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, but look at it this way. I’m probably the only date you’ve ever had who won’t cheat on you.”
The light changed and I eased the car forward. “You have a point.”
“Besides,” he said, resting his huge right hand on the dashboard in front of him, “you could have brought someone. And,” he added with an eager smile full of mischief, “if you couldn’t think of anyone you wanted to ask, Alma has a whole list she’s just dying to have you meet.”
“Well, if any of them look like Alma…”
Horace shook his head. “No one looks like Alma.”
He had been married for nearly twenty years and was the only married man I knew who never even thought about another woman. It was not his fault. Tall, thin, with almond-shaped eyes and smooth, dark skin that glowed like polished stone, Alma Woolner was one of the most exquisite women I had ever met. She loved dance and for the last eight years had been the unpaid president of the Portland Ballet Company. Tonight was the opening performance of the summer season. That had been Alma’s idea. All the major ballet companies performed in the winter. Some of their dancers might come to Portland when they had nothing else they had to do.
“You like federal court?” Horace asked.
“Not really,” I replied as I slowed down and pulled into the line for valet parking. I stretched my right arm across the back of the seat and turned toward him. “Once you’re in court there really isn’t much to do. I wrote out all the questions beforehand and submitted them to the court. The judge used a couple of them, but that was it, that was voir dire. And then we had six defendants. You sit there, six defendants charged with a conspiracy along with their six lawyers, and you know damn well every juror in the box is looking at you and all they see are twelve people conspiring to get away with something! I mean, it’s really ludicrous, isn’t it? The government proves the conspiracy by making them look as if they’re still conspiring.”
“Which judge?” Horace inquired.
“McGruder.”
Horace nodded thoughtfully. “He’s good. All those federal judges—well, almost all of them—are good. There isn’t a state court judge alive nearly as good. Except Rifkin.”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “but, hell, Leopold is so much better than anyone else it almost doesn’t count. So anyway,” I went on, getting back to the trial, “when it finally got started two months after it was supposed to, it went on for weeks. Six defense lawyers, and every one of them gets to cross-examine each one of the state’s witnesses. By the time it was my turn to ask a question, I couldn’t even remember the questions that had already been asked.”
I was at the head of the line. I put the car in neutral and started to open the door. “Seven weeks that stupid trial lasted,” I complained just before I stepped out.
Horace waited for me to come around. “You know this guy you represented—Belnikov? He’s got to be part of the Russian Mafia. One of the things they do is run cars. Don’t you think it’s kind of ironic?” he asked as he held open the door to the lobby of the theater.
“What?”
“That the Russian Mafia managed to get themselves a Sicilian lawyer?”
I glanced up at him as I passed in front of him. “Racist.”
We had three tickets in the orchestra. A few minutes after the house lights dimmed, Alma Woolner slipped into the seat between us. She had been at the theater since early afternoon. “Hello, Joe,” she whispered as she kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Thanks for bringing Horace.”
Before I could say anything, the music started and Alma’s eyes were riveted on the stage as the curtain came up and Billy the Kid began.
When it was over, Horace and I waited in the lobby while Alma went backstage. “You ever wonder what would happen if they performed this somewhere out in eastern Oregon, with real cowboys in the audience?” Horace asked.
“Maybe at the Pendleton Roundup?”
“No, not there, at least not then. Everybody’s from Portland. No, Pendleton or LaGrande or Baker, with just the locals. What do you think they’d do, watching these dancers with their tights and big pouches right in front, and those tight butts sticking out in back, frolicking around on invisible horses? I don’t think it would be a very pretty sight, do you?”
“You’re sick, Horace. And besides that, you’re wrong. The only cowboys left are in commercials. People out there aren’t any different than those here. They watch the same television, drive the same cars, live in the same kind of houses, shop in the same malls. The only difference is they have to drive a little farther to the store.”
Afterwards Alma insisted that I come back to their place for a drink. When we got there she had half a glass of wine and then, explaining she was “just exhausted,” she excused herself and went to bed. I finished what was left in my glass and stood up to leave.
“No, don’t go,” Horace said. “Stick around a while. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. It’s not something Alma would have been interested in. She loves the ballet; she only tolerates the law.”
We were sitting in his study. Like his office, it was a clinical report on the obsessive fear of disorder. On top of the desk was a single yellow legal pad with nothing written on it. A black fountain pen, cap screwed on, lay right next to it.
He handed me a scotch and soda. “I wanted to tell you about the Morel case. Denise Morel. The one who killed her husband—your client—Johnny Morel.”
I sank back into the leather chair, stretched my legs out onto the ottoman, and listened.
“She hired a pretty good lawyer. That surprised me. Alex Rosenbaum. He’s not as expensive as you are—hell, no one is as expensive as you are—but he isn’t cheap. I don’t know where she got the money. Or, at least I didn’t know at the beginning. I’ve got a pretty good idea now where she got it.”
