Jails are also places with hygienic rules. Since criminals are frequently the type to defer bathing, and brushing and flossing their teeth, and since such behavior lends itself to epidemic, showers are part of an unbending routine. The Patterson brothers were counting on it.
“What do you mean?” the man with a Spanish accent asked Mr. Stuart.
“I mean they’ll be out in eight years. Considering they murdered a family of four and got caught red-handed with a large supply of cocaine, it’s one hell of a good deal,” the attorney replied. He didn’t like doing business on Sunday, and especially didn’t like doing business with this man in the den of his home with his family in the backyard, but he had chosen to do business with drug types. He told himself at least ten times with every single case that he’d been a fool to have taken the first one – and gotten him off, of course, because the DEA agents had screwed up their warrant, tainting all the evidence and tossing the case on a classic “legal technicality.” That success, which had earned him fifty thousand dollars for four days’ work, had given him a “name” within the drug community, which had money to burn – or to hire good criminal lawyers. You couldn’t easily say no to such people. They were genuinely frightening. They had killed lawyers who displeased them. And they paid so well, well enough that he could take time to apply his considerable talents to indigent clients who couldn’t pay. At least that was one of the arguments he used on sleepless nights to justify dealing with the animals. “Look, these guys were looking at a seat in the electric chair – life at minimum – and I knocked that down to twenty years and out in eight. For Christ’s sake, that’s a goddamned good deal.”
“I think you could do better,” the man replied with a blank look and in a voice so devoid of emotion as to be mechanistic. And decidedly frightening to a lawyer who had never owned or shot a gun.
That was the other side of the equation. They didn’t merely hire him. Somewhere else was another lawyer, one who gave advice without getting directly involved. It was a simple security provision. It also made perfect professional sense, of course, to get a second opinion of anything. It also meant that in special cases the drug community could make sure that its own attorney wasn’t making some sort of arrangement with the state, as was not entirely unknown in the countries from which they came. And as was the case here, some might say. Stuart could have played his information from the Coasties for all it was worth, gambling to have the whole case thrown out. He estimated a fifty-fifty chance of that. Stuart was good, even brilliant in a courtroom, but so was Davidoff, and there is not a trial lawyer in the world who would have predicted the reaction of a jury – a south Alabama, law-and-order jury – to a case like this one. Whoever was in the shadows giving advice to the man in his den, he was not as good as Stuart in a courtroom. Probably an academic, the trial lawyer thought, maybe a professor supplementing his teaching income with some informal consulting. Whoever he- she? -was, Stuart hated him on instinct.
“If I do what you want me to do, we run the risk of blowing the whole case. They really could end up in the chair.” It also would mean wrecking the careers of Coast Guard sailors who had done wrong, but not nearly so wrong as Stuart’s clients had most certainly done. His ethical duty as a lawyer was to give his clients the best possible defense within the law, within the Standards of Professional Conduct, but most of all, within the scope of his knowledge and experience – instinct, which was as real and important as it was impossible to quantify. Exactly how a lawyer balanced his duty on that three-cornered scale was the subject of endless class hours in law school, but the answers arrived at in the theaterlike lecture halls were always clearer than in the real legal world found beyond the green campus lawns.
“They could also go free.”
The man’s thinking reversal on appeal, Stuart realized. It was an academic lawyer giving advice.
“My professional advice to my clients is to accept the deal that I have negotiated.”
“Your clients will decline that advice. Your clients will tell you tomorrow morning to – what is the phrase? Go for broke?” The man smiled like a dangerous machine. “Those are your instructions. Good day, Mr. Stuart. I can find the door.” The machine left.
Stuart stared at his bookcases for a few minutes before making his telephone call. He might as well do it now. No sense making Davidoff wait. No public announcement had yet been made, though the rumors were out on the street. He wondered how the U.S. Attorney would take it. It was easier to predict what he’d say. The outraged I thought we had a deal! would be followed by a resolute Okay, we’ll see what the jury says! Davidoff would muster his considerable talents, and the battle in Federal District Court would be an epic duel. But that was what courts were all about, wasn’t it? It would be a fascinating and exciting technical exercise in the theory of the law, but like most such exercises, it would have little to do with right and wrong, less to do with what had actually happened aboard the good ship Empire Builder, and nothing at all to do with justice.
Murray was in his office. Moving into their townhouse had been a formality. He slept there – most of the time – but he saw far less of it than he’d seen of his official apartment in the Kensington section of London while legal attaché to the embassy on Grosvenor Square. It was hardly fair. For what it had cost him to move back to the D.C. area – the city that provided a home for the United States government denied decent housing to those on government salaries – one would have thought that he’d have gotten some real use from it.
His secretary was not in on Sunday, of course, and that meant Murray had to answer his own phone. This one came in on his direct, private line.
“Yeah, Murray here.”
“Mark Bright. There’s been a development on the Pirates Case that you need to know about. The lawyer for the subjects just called the U.S. Attorney. He’s tossing the deal they made. He’s going to fight it out; he’s going to put those Coasties on the stand and try to blow away the whole case on the basis of that stunt they pulled. Davidoff’s worried.”
“What do you think?” Murray asked.
“Well, he’ll reinstate the whole case: drug-related capital murder. If it means clobbering the Coast Guard, well, that’s the price of justice. His words, not mine,” Bright pointed out. Like many FBI agents, the agent was also a member of the bar. “Going on my experience, not his, I’d say it’s real gray, Dan. Davidoff’s good – I mean, he’s really good in front of a jury – but so’s the defense guy, Stuart. The local DEA hates his guts, but he’s an effective son of a bitch. The law is pretty muddled. What’ll the judge say? Depends on the judge. What’ll the jury say – depends on what the judge says and does. It’s like putting a bet down on the next Super Bowl right now, before the season starts, and that doesn’t even take into account what’ll happen in the U.S. Court of Appeals after the trial’s over in District Court. Whatever happens, the Coasties are going to get raped. Too bad. No matter what, Davidoff is going to tear each of ’em a new asshole for getting him into this mess.”
“Warn ’em,” Murray said. He told himself that it was an impulsive statement, but it wasn’t. Murray believed in law, but he believed in justice more.
“You want to repeat that, sir?”
“They gave us TARPON.”
“Mr. Murray” – he wasn’t “Dan” now – “I might have to arrest them. Davidoff just might set up a grand jury on this and -”
“Warn them. That is an order, Mr. Bright. I presume the local cops have a good attorney who represents them. Recommend that attorney to Captain Wegener and his men.”
Bright hesitated before replying. “Sir, what you just told me to do might be seen as -”
“Mark, I’ve been in the Bureau a long time. Maybe too damned long,” Murray’s fatigue – and some other things – said. “But I won’t stand by and watch these men get ambushed for doing something that helped us. They’ll have to take their chances with the law – but by God, they’ll have the same advantages that those fucking pirates have! We owe them that much. Log that one in as my order and carry it out.”