Authors: Alfredo Vea
There was a gasp of disbelief at the table. Most victims simply identified as their assailant whoever was sitting next to counsel at the defense table. On several occasions victims have been known to choose the attorney as their attacker when the defendant happened to be dressed in a better suit than his lawyer’s. An honest victim is as rare as an honest defendant.
“She had told my investigator the same thing months earlier. She had never seen her attacker’s face. She had real courage, that lady. Well, I didn’t really have any more questions for her beyond that. They had no fingerprints and no other eyewitnesses. After her identification fell apart, the prosecutor’s case was purely circumstantial and with no direct connection to my boy. A few hours after the crime was committed, my client was arrested down in the Tenderloin, near Leavenworth and Hyde Streets, with some of her credit cards in his possession. He had tried to use an automatic teller machine.”
“He found them,” Newton intoned convincingly.
“He bought them from the perpetrator,” said Chris Gauger, a new arrival at the table.
“Exactly,” said Matt. “Even though I believed it was a thin, circumstantial case, I could still sense that the jury wanted to convict somebody. You know what I’m talking about.”
Everyone knew what he was talking about.
“Anyway, the poor woman felt so filthy and violated after the rape that she douched and showered almost immediately afterward. Of course there was no semen to test. They just couldn’t make my boy with the evidence they had. Even with all of that jury sentiment, he was as good as free. His black ass was already out the door.
“So after the witness failed to identify the perpetrator, the prosecutor was sweating bullets in front of the jury box and just dying on his redirect examination. The jury wasn’t buying any of what he had to sell. But then, all of a sudden, my client started elbowing me and screaming at me, ‘Ask her if he had a scar on his ass! Ask her if he had a scar on his ass!’ ”
There was a knowing groan around the table. Eyes closed in pain and arms were upraised in despair. Each two and three-piece suit around the table was turning slowly to rags and sackcloth.
“I told him to sit down and shut up, but he persisted. The toothless sumbitch was screaming his demand directly into my right ear. I tried to quiet him up, but every person on the jury heard it. I swear his breath was so bad that I’ve had straight hair ever since.” He raised his eyebrows as he looked up toward his own brown, once curly head of hair.
“He kept getting louder and louder, insisting that his stupid question be asked. Finally, in desperation, I stood up and moved for a recess. The clerk hit her secret switch; the judge jerked upright, blinked twice, denied my motion with prejudice, and promptly suggested that we take a recess. I sat my man down in the holding cell and tried to explain, but it was useless.”
Every cup of coffee at the table was being allowed to go cold. Here, in all of its glory, was irony.
“I pleaded—I begged the damn fool to let me run my case. I even promised to show him my diploma from Georgetown School of Law. I think some three-time loser must have planted the crazy question in his head while they were together in the weight room. Despite my firm assurances about the state of the case, my client insisted that I ask that damned question.”
“Jailhouse lawyers,” Newton grunted. “It kills me that the biggest losers are always the ones handing out the most advice.”
“So I made my record in chambers, and I moved for a directed verdict of acquittal based on a clear failure of the evidence, but the judge pointed out that all of the evidence had not been heard yet,” continued Matt. “Old Judge Garfield woke up long enough to rule that the defendant had a right to have his question asked, even if it was against the advice of counsel. When I personally refused to ask the question, the judge sneered through his yellow dentures and informed my client that he himself could put the question to the witness.”
“That was kind of him! Did you know that he had his dentures tinted to match his only remaining tooth? The DA must’ve been salivating,” said Jesse.
“Not as much as the judge was,” said Matt. “The old man actually stayed wide awake long enough to hear the question propounded and the answer given. He was up there on the bench grinning like the Cheshire cat, though I think I did detect some shallow breathing and rapid eye movement. So after the DA was through with the witness, my genius client Dewilliam Magpie—I swear to God that was his name—stood up, extended his arm, and pointed a stern and accusatory finger at the witness.”
“The jury must have loved that,” muttered Jesse.
Matt only shook his head dejectedly.
“Meanwhile, back at the defense table, here I am acting all nonchalant, but inside, you know my shit was going to pieces. After staring her in the eyes for a painful eternity or two, Dewilliam launched his brilliant question at her. I could see it! I swear I could see that idiotic question as it ran down from his shoulder, across his elbow, over his wrist, then leaped from his pointing, untrimmed fingernail! That question jumped from his inept brain like a madman leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge. ‘Miss Victim, did the man who attacked you happen to have a scar on his ass?’ ”
The entire table moaned in the throes of agony.
“At first the poor woman looked a bit puzzled by the question, but after a moment her eyes began to grow huge and a look of tremendous excitement transformed her face. ‘Yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘There was a scar on his buttocks! I remember it now! I saw it when he was done with me and getting dressed. It was jagged, like a bolt of lightning.’ As she said it, her index finger drew the shape in the air above the witness box. I could see that all of the jurors were leaning forward in the box. There were tears in her eyes and flowing down her cheeks. ‘It was on the right side.’
“Well,” said Matt, “y‘all know what happened next. The bailiff called for more backup, and right in front of the jury they dragged my fool client into the holding cell. Then they pulled down his pants and took a couple of Polaroid shots of his funky butt. Then they brought the defendant back into the courtroom and proceeded to give the pictures to the prosecutor. Both of those bailiffs were grinning like they’d just won the lottery, and when I saw that my heart fell through the floor. When the photographs were shown to the victim, she began sobbing at the top of her lungs. ’That’s the scar! Oh, my God, that’s the scar!‘ ”
The lawyers were roaring now in aching, throbbing spasms of ironic laughter. Dewilliam Magpie and others of his ilk were legendary, archetypal clients, men whose stupidity was used first as a sharp sword when they committed their awful crimes, then later as a frail shield to protect them when they were caught. Their stupidity would shield them against logic, against the tide of evidence, against the advice of counsel, and finally against the verdict and even against the sentence that would follow. It would protect them from everything but their own foolishness. Even years later Dewilliam would not be able to comprehend how it was that the victim had come to identify him in that courtroom.
Decades later, safely ensconced in the maximum-security wing of Folsom Prison, he would pass interminable hours and days blaming it all on his lawyer. His dumptruck, shyster lawyer had fucked him. Surrounded by tattooed men who declared themselves to be daring bank robbers and worldly drug traffickers, but who were, in actuality, only lewd pedophiles and compulsive mailbox thieves, he would proclaim his eternal martyrdom: “Muthafuckin’ lawyer fucked me.”
“Stupidity is always its own best defense,” said Jesse, his face caught somewhere between anger and pity. “I’ve had a hundred like Dewilliam Magpie. Five hundred.”
“Just tell us your worst one,” said Matt. “We of the defense, we of the single reasonable doubt, we of the long odds and the short end of every stick want only the finest draughts of sweet liqueur at this auspicious, albeit monthly gathering. Only the most sublime distillations of our craft are recounted here.” He raised his arm in a sweeping, evangelical gesture as he spoke.
“Do you mean,” said Jesse, smiling, “the dude who was accused of robbery and stood up in court and announced to the judge, ‘Your honor, you have to dismiss this case. I can’t identity this here victim. That ain’t the guy I robbed!’ ”
Jesse looked around the table at his laughing friends. They reminded him of his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. They had to laugh now and then and it was good that they did. Criminal defense is the emergency room of the law, and the constant pressure had to be relieved somehow. Grunts of the law, he thought, field medics performing triage in the crowded jails and holding cells behind the staid courtrooms. We tend the wounded, he thought, those who were wounded by life, by testosterone, by poverty. In this business, everyone gets wounded. Every lawyer at the table had suffered for his or her clients.
Real trial lawyers were like weary foot soldiers or sweating defensive linemen in football—tireless, maverick, and cynical. Their true skill was measured by how far they strayed from the lawbooks and from the cant of sterilized language and practice. The prosecutors were offensive linemen—neat and efficient. They were an orderly phalanx, a disciplined picket line that always deployed in perfect five-meter spreads. In the stylized warfare of the courtroom, the defense lawyers were the guerrillas, the Vietcong.
But in all truth, this business of criminal justice was nothing like the infantry or football. Jesse shook his head without knowing it. He had been shaking his head in disgust for almost fifteen years. Somehow the action comforted him, freed him in some small measure from the war that haunted him. In the morning, after a bout with his nightmares of Vietnam, he would rise from bed shaking his head in sorrow.
Here, in the House of Toast, after a morning in court, he would shake his head in disgust. In this business, even the third- and fourth-stringers played. They were everywhere, maneuvering themselves to get the prettiest law clerk or the next judicial appointment. They had become public defender supervisors without caseloads. They had battered their clients into plea bargains. They had evolved into pipe-smoking elder-statesmen attorneys merely by their presence in the hallways for a decade or so. The Mexicans called such lawyers
cagatintas,
ink shitters. In the Hall of Justice, there were cagatintas everywhere.
Jesse shook his head once more. This army was top-heavy with deskbound colonels jockeying for judgeships. In this business, it was easy to hide. Beads of sweat began to form on Jesse’s brow as familiar feelings of anger rose up once again. His anger at the cagatintas was becoming muddled, confused with the horrid dreams that had wakened him so early this morning. He took a deep breath to calm himself. His internal heat began to subside only when he looked around the table and reminded himself that he was surrounded by grunts, people whose asses were still in the high grasses. There were no
cagatintas
here.
Jesse unclenched his fists and closed his eyes to help release the anger. The Veterans’ Administration psychologists had taught him how to distract himself with unrelated thoughts whenever the pangs came.
“Or perhaps,” said Jesse, as his thoughts returned to the circle of defense lawyers, “you want to hear about el Medico Largo, the famous Dr. Long? Remember him? He called himself ‘El Pitón,’ but his favorite alias was Felix Meterpalo.”
Only the Spanish speakers laughed at his puns.
“He was the phony sex therapist who was charged with about thirty counts of rape a couple of years back? He treated sexual dysfunction in older women by administering his now infamous ‘hot beef injections.’ The DA’s problem was that every one of those acts was completely consensual.”
“I remember that one,” said Matt excitedly. “He was a dapper little Mexican guy who wore a toupee and always dressed in a shabby white tuxedo. I was there for the preliminary hearing. I swear, it looked like a goddamn beauty shop in the courtroom with all of that blue hair and rouge, and it smelled like the perfume counter at a drugstore. I seem to recall that not one single victim testified against him.”
“Not a soul,” smiled Jesse. “They all steadfastly refused, and good Judge Moscone wasn’t about to issue a contempt citation to witnesses who looked just like his own dear mother. None of the alleged victims wanted their money back either. El Medico Largo kept saying all along that no one would press charges. After his case was dismissed, Dr. Long left with two of the victims—two widows, twin sisters, I believe. They all climbed into a white Bentley limousine and disappeared toward Daly City. I think he was driving.”
Jesse laughed at his own private joke. In Spanish the verb “to drive,”
manejar,
can also mean “to screw.”
“Why wasn’t it a hot chorizo injection?” asked Newton.
Jesse grinned. “If he had been Chinese he would have called himself Dr. Oolong.”
“Do you think those women loved him, Jesse? How else can you explain their refusal to prosecute him for fraud?”
“I don’t know anything about love,” answered Jesse quietly. “Maybe it was. I suppose it could have been something close to it, a mimic of love or an isotope. You’re asking the wrong person.”
Jesse looked away from his friends. All of them were married and most of them had children. All that Jesse had been able to manage had been a series of aimless affairs. He had been lucky in the war. He was ambulatory. His sight and hearing were intact. All that had been amputated was his ability to give or receive love.
“But the good Dr. Largo wasn’t the most interesting of all of my cases,” continued Jesse. “I can offer up the absurd tale of one Mohammed al-Farouk, formerly known as Willie B. Shipwright of the renowned Sunnydale Project Shipwrights. His street name was Keloid.
“Now, Keloid had four or five burglary priors and in his new case was charged with about fifteen counts of residential burglary. In other words, he was looking at forever in custody. They would be playing the Super Bowl on the moon by the time Keloid was released.
“Here was a real pro. Keloid literally left no stone unturned. If there was a stone, my man would turn it and leave a fingerprint. Fifteen burglaries and lo and behold, there are fifteen pristine sets of fingerprints. And all in the exact same location: the flush handle of the toilet. It seems Keloid had a thing about using the toilet in every house he burglarized. I guess the one at home didn’t work.