Defense, page 4
“And whose fault is that?” I lashed back.
She looked at me with contempt. “Does the truth make you angry?”
Her derisive smile made me angry. “There’s no point to this,” I said as I got up. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out.” I stood right next to her and touched her shoulder. She looked away.
Upstairs, in the bedroom, while I drank what was left of my coffee, I heard the door downstairs shut behind her. A few minutes later the engine of her car started up, and then I heard her drive off.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was incapable of a ‘meaningful, lasting relationship.’ All I knew for sure was that I was coming into middle age and nothing had lasted yet. I crawled back into bed and tried to get back to sleep. It was no use. Everything was spinning around in my head. Lisa was gone and Sunday was the one day we had always spent together. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It did not really matter, of course. It was only one day. On Monday everything would be back to normal. I got up, threw on an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and went down to my study. I checked the calendar. The first thing I had Monday morning was a visit to the county jail to see Johnny Morel. It was almost a comfort. I knew how to deal with criminals.
* * *
The county jail was in desperate need of maintenance and repair. Cracks spread across the plastered walls, hinges that held the heavy metal doors had begun to rust, dirt and grease were embedded in the ceiling, traces of human excrement clung to the toilets that stood exposed in the cells. I was put in a room the size of a small closet, divided in half by a wire-mesh screen that contained a small opening through which legal documents could be passed back and forth.
I sat on a metal stool bolted to the floor and waited in the drowsy daytime silence. It had been a while since my last visit. The paint had been changed to a gruesome shade of green. I could not remember what color it had been painted before. Whatever it had been, this was worse. A pair of eyes peered through the narrow window in the door. The jailer’s keys jangled as he searched for the right one. The door swung open slowly, and for the first time I was looking at Johnny Morel face-to-face.
His eyes, which at first I had thought hollow, now seemed dark and impenetrable, as if there were nothing behind them except the primitive instincts of hatred and fear. Under the harsh glare of the fluorescent light, the scar that in court had seemed so sinister was barely distinguishable on the leather-tough skin stretched taut along the contours of his lower jaw. He was short, five foot eight at the outside, but powerfully built. Something about the way he held himself suggested he was always ready for some small act of violence. Nicotine stains discolored two of his fingers. His teeth were irregular and badly spaced.
I started to remind him who I was and why I was there. Before I could say a word his eyes began to dart all around. “The little bitch is a goddamn liar!” he shouted without warning. “I didn’t do anything to her! Nothing! Not a fucking thing! The little whore!” he shrieked, throwing one fist against the wall. “The fucking little whore!”
Then, as quickly as it had begun, it stopped. His mouth hung half open as he panted for breath. Through the wire-mesh screen his eyes stared at me, measuring my reaction.
I knew the game, and I knew how to play it. For a moment I just stared back at him. Looking as bored as I could, I remarked, “If you’re through with your little show, Mr. Morel, perhaps we can get down to business.”
His mouth twitched at the corners and he blinked. Shutting his mouth and clenching his teeth, he was working himself up for another explosion. I held up my hand. “Don’t even think about it. Yell at me again and I’ll just walk out of here. You have to stay, I don’t.”
His mouth dropped open again and he stared straight ahead with leaden eyes. He did not know what to say.
“Let’s not waste any more time,” I said before he could think of something. “I have the police reports and I want you to read them all.”
I passed a copy of the police report through the narrow opening in the screen. He grabbed at it and tore it away before I let go. Small victories were the only kind he understood.
“I want you to read every page of this,” I said, ignoring what he had done. “Read it when you’re back in your cell. Take a pencil. Make a check mark next to anything you think is wrong or anything that reminds you of something else I should know. I’ll come back in a day or two. We’ll talk about it then.”
He did not look up. He was concentrating on the first typewritten page of the police report. All the anger had vanished from his face. Narrow lines formed around the corners of his eyes as he struggled with the meaning of the words. His lips formed the sounds of what he saw.
“How far did you go in school?” I asked quietly, a little embarrassed.
He looked up. “Far enough,” he said, the defiance that had become a part of his character edging its way back into his voice.
I let it go. “We’ll talk about those later,” I said, gesturing toward the sheaf of papers he held in his hand.
“There’s something else,” I said as I closed my briefcase and stood up. “Something you need to understand. I can’t put anyone on the stand I know is going to commit perjury. That means,” I explained the same way I had explained it a thousand times before, “that if a defendant tells me he did what he’s charged with, I can’t allow him to testify.”
It would have been hard to invent a more powerful incentive for a defendant to lie to his attorney. But there it was, a legal nicety designed to protect the reputation of a profession it was thought impossible to defame.
“I’m not pleading guilty!” he cried. “I’m telling the truth. I didn’t do a goddamn thing. The little whore’s a liar!”
The words joined all the other defiant denials that had been thrown at me over the years in a vast, mocking echo of duplicity. Juries were supposed to believe in the presumption of innocence; I believed in the certainty of guilt. If the defendant was innocent he could prove it—to me. These people lied for a living. They stole, cheated, beat up the defenseless, and preyed on the vulnerable. They raped women and children. You could never take them at their word. They never told the truth to their lawyers unless they thought it was the only way they could win. Morel called the girl a liar. What else was he going to do?
I left him to wait for the jailer to take him back to his cell. By the time I got to my car I had forgotten all about him. There were a dozen different things to do and not nearly enough time to do them. I had parked on the street to save time. It was just a few minutes before eight-thirty when I slid behind the wheel. At ten o’clock I was scheduled to appear in Polk County on a motion to suppress. There was a chance I might just make it.
The rains had come back. Just south of Portland a car hydroplaned across the freeway and spun halfway down an embankment. The police and the paramedics had already arrived. I wondered if the driver would wind up at Lisa’s hospital. And then I wondered if Lisa and some doctor would joke about how many lawyers died when they crashed their cars in their hurry to give business cards to the accident victim before he lost consciousness. They told the joke a lot. The punch line was “not enough.”
The rain was coming down hard, and the wind was kicking up. I was going to be late and there was nothing I could do about it. In Salem the weather cleared and I made up some time. When I crossed the bridge over the Willamette River it was twenty to ten. The highway followed the river as it curled its way through the orchards and open fields that spread out across the valley toward the coastal range. The clock on the tower of the old county courthouse was just striking ten when I pulled up in front. I bounded up the steps, dashed into the lobby, and took the rickety wooden staircase to the second floor two steps at a time.
Half a dozen lawyers were milling around outside the clerk’s office. The morning docket was listed on a chalk board on the wall. State v. Hilfiker was first. I found my client sitting in the back row of the courtroom. The building had been constructed in 1896. Except for an air-conditioning unit stuck into the wall just below one of the two windows, the courtroom looked the same way it always had. Twelve wooden swivel chairs were bolted to the floor of the jury box. An old lectern, a relic of a time when lawyers read their speeches to the jury, sat forgotten in the corner. Strange-looking gargoyles, like the keepers of the gates of Hell, stared down from the cornices high above.
I sat down just as the judge was getting ready to have the first case called. Judge Timothy Llewelyn had a round face and a double chin. From a distance he always looked a little out of focus. There was nothing unclear about his mind, however. Perhaps because they had to handle everything themselves, rural judges were sometimes the most thoroughly prepared.
“Is the defense ready to proceed, Mr. Antonelli?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“All right then. I’ve read the motion, the accompanying affidavit, and the brief you submitted. And I’ve read the state’s response. How many witnesses do you intend to call?”
Before I could answer, the deputy district attorney, a balding, overweight young man in a loose-fitting, rumpled suit, announced without a trace of either regret or embarrassment: “Your honor, we’d ask that this matter be set over for a few days.”
I could not believe it. “Set over? Your honor, this has been on the calendar for more than a month! My client is here. I’m here.”
Llewelyn waved me off. “What is the reason, Mr. Forbes, for your request?”
“The police officer who conducted the search is testifying in a trial this morning down in Eugene.”
I was furious. “Your honor, I have that officer under subpoena!”
“Mr. Forbes?”
“Well, your honor, so did the state. But the trial in Eugene got delayed a day and the officer has to be there. He can’t be in two places at once.”
Llewelyn was no fool. “When did you find out about this?”
“This morning, your honor. Less than thirty minutes ago.”
Llewelyn opened his eyes wide and leaned forward. “Are you telling me that the officer only found out this morning that the trial in which he was supposed to testify yesterday was postponed?”
He was careful. “I just know when he told us, your honor.”
Llewelyn turned to me. “I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. Could you come back the day after tomorrow? Wednesday, say, two o’clock?”
I glanced at my calendar. Wednesday was like every other day. There was no time for anything. But when I looked a little closer I saw that none of the things I had that afternoon involved a court appearance. Everything else could be moved around, rescheduled in the constant shuffle that had become a normal part of my everyday existence.
“Sure,” I said, looking up, “I’d be glad to, your honor.”
After explaining to an angry client that he had nothing to be angry about, I drove back to Portland. I had a one o’clock hearing just down the hall from Rifkin’s courtroom.
* * *
Three days after I had left him sulking in jail, I went back to see Johnny Morel. “Have you finished reading the report?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the floor. “I read it. All of it.”
“And?” I asked.
He barely raised his head. “And what?”
“‘And what?’ Is that all you’ve got to say?”
He raised his head just a little higher. “What do you want me to say, man? I read it. It’s all bullshit.”
He put one foot up against the wall in front of him and pushed until the metal chair leaned back. A look of bored condescension spread over his face. “I could have told you before I read this shit that the little cunt is a lying little whore. Shit, man, I did tell you.”
Slowly, as if at any moment he might change his mind and sit down again, he got to his feet and put his face right next to the screen. “I told you before, and I’ll tell you again,” he said in a flat, coarse voice, “that little bitch wants to get rid of me. She made all this bullshit up. I never touched her. And that,” he hissed, “is the fuckin’ truth.”
“Why? Why does she hate you so much she would make up a story like this?”
“Because she was out of control!” he cried with a contemptuous stare. “Because she was used to doing whatever the hell she wanted. Because I made it stop. I disciplined her. Check it out, man. Check with her school. They’ll tell you. They sent her home because she was causing so much trouble. And I made her go back. I made her agree to knock it off and do her work like everybody else. That really pissed her off,” he added with a triumphant sneer.
I made him go through every line of the police report. His mood was erratic, swinging from one extreme to the other. One moment he was looking right at me as if he were challenging me; the next moment he was looking away as if he had forgotten I was even there. He was defiant, afraid, indifferent, intense, certain, confused. It was as if he wanted to see what worked. For nearly three hours, I asked questions and he answered. And at the end he had told me nothing I had not learned from the very first answer he gave. He was telling the truth. The girl was a liar.
“Ask Denise. She’ll tell you!” he shouted. “Ask Denise! Ask the little whore’s mother! Ask her! Ask my wife! Ask Denise! She knows! She’ll tell you!”
“And just what will she tell me?” I asked, doing nothing to conceal my skepticism.
Morel stared at me. He looked like a derelict, staggering into the light, too drunk to stand. Then, without warning, he threw himself at me as hard as he could, grabbing the wire-mesh screen with the fingers of both hands as he smashed his face right into it. “She’ll tell you her goddamn daughter is a goddamn motherfucking liar! That’s what she’ll tell you!”
His face was covered with tiny red rectangular marks that matched the rough symmetry of the screen. There was a deep gash just above his eyebrow. Blood formed at the edge. If he felt any pain he gave no sign of it. He gave no sign of anything, except a single-minded hatred.
I had had enough. He had been trying to measure me, trying to find out what it would take to get me to believe him, because he could never quite believe that a lawyer who did not believe him would ever really try to get him off. It was time to measure him.
“We can probably get this cleared up in a few days. If you’re interested, that is.”
He was surprised. “How?” he asked blankly.
“Are you willing to take a polygraph?”
“A lie detector?”
“That’s right. I can arrange it. If you pass, they’ll probably drop the charges.”
Anyone who had spent as much time in the system as he had knew that the results of a polygraph test could not be used in court. He knew that if he failed the prosecution could not use it against him. Still, I had not anticipated how quickly he would agree. He was not only willing, he was eager to take a polygraph. He would pass. He was sure of it. He was telling the truth.
For the first time, I began to have the beginnings of a doubt. Was it possible the girl had been lying all along, and that this miserable excuse for a human being had been falsely accused? It had happened before. The polygraph would tell one way or the other. I scheduled it for early the next week.
* * *
Raymond Kowalski was waiting for me, just inside the main entrance to the police station. As soon as I saw him I started to smile. He never changed. He was in his mid-forties, but he still looked like an overfed teenager wrapped in baby fat. The tan corduroy jacket he wore struggled against itself in a tug-of-war over a single, exhausted, plastic button in the front. There was barely a line to disturb the tranquillity of his round face, not a fleck of gray in the thick tousled madness of sandy brown hair that covered his head. He had the slightly astonished look of an eager sheepdog. Children loved him; old ladies thought they should help him across the street.
“You’re a little late, counselor,” he said, a broad grin stretching across his red, cherubic face.
I could not help myself. “I wanted to give you enough time to beat a confession out of my client,” I remarked as we shook hands. “Nice jacket,” I added, as I grabbed the lapel between my thumb and forefinger. I had never once, not in all the years I had known him, seen him wear anything else. “New?”
“Oh, I’ve had it for a while,” he chuckled, as he led me inside a door marked Official Personnel Only.
I followed him down an aisleway between two rows of metal desks. We were in the middle of the homicide division. A plain-clothes detective was pecking out a report on an old upright typewriter. Another one, halfway across the room, was on the telephone. All the other desks were vacant.
“You miss homicide?” I asked, as we sat down at his desk in the far corner of the room.
“No, not really.” He paused for a moment, and looked at me with a twinkle in his friendly eyes. “Yeah, actually, I miss it a lot. But that’s between us.”
Kowalski was one of the few cops I liked, and just about the only one I trusted. He was the best homicide detective the city had until he took a bullet in the chest one night during what was supposed to have been a routine domestic disturbance. The bullet was still there, lodged less than an inch from his heart.
He reached inside his desk and pulled out a file. “I’ve read the reports,” he said as he opened it and glanced at the contents. He looked up, like a poker player peering over his cards. A sparkle started to dance in his guileless eyes. “What would you like to bet on this one?”
I kept a straight face. “Are you giving odds?”
“It would be unfair,” he admitted. “I know this guy.”
I should not have been surprised, but I was. “You know Morel? Have you polygraphed him before?”
“No. This will be the first time. He was involved in an investigation, four, maybe five years ago.”
“Homicide?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t a suspect,” he added quickly. “He was just someone who knew the victim and the guy who killed her. It was pretty awful. The guy was loaded up on drugs. He may have been hallucinating.” He shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know. But he took a knife to the girl he was living with and butchered her.”
