He was right about that. The intelligence he was referring to was probably gathered through the most sensitive means available, and Katherine hadn’t shown herself to be someone the U.S. government should entrust with such deep dark secrets.
He stood up and started walking for the door. “Anything more comes up, I’ll keep you informed.”
“Anything specific you expect me to do at this point?” I asked.
He had the door open and was just walking out. “Nope.” Then the door shut behind him.
It was, all in all, a completely dopey conversation. He’d said something, and he’d said nothing. If I was the really suspicious sort, I might think he was probing to see if I was amenable to becoming his stooge, and I’d scared him off, so he’d resorted to that little cover story about North Koreans. That might sound fairly paranoid to most folks, but most folks haven’t spent as much time around spooks as I have. They lie to their own mothers just for practice.
If nothing else, this little tete-a-tete had made me suddenly aware of the importance the U.S. government was placing on our efforts to defend Whitehall. Face it, they’d be stupid to be complacent. Carlson was a ruthless fanatic, and fate had just handed her the power to take a meat cleaver to the alliance. Those folks back in Washington probably wanted her watched like a hawk.
I got a lousy night’s sleep. I kept trying to recall my Swedish stewardess with the Bronx twang and Italian name, but time and distance were rapidly diffusing her into a foggy ghost. Instead, a smallish woman with long, dark hair, an angelic face, and emerald-like eyes kept mulishly butting her way into my head. I knew I wasn’t having desirous thoughts, because I’ve never been a sucker for unrequited lust. I like my fantasies reciprocated.
When I awoke in the morning I felt grizzly and raw. I opened the blinds to explore the day.
Back when I was in law school, there was this professor named Maladroit who taught legal ethics. I’m not making this up, either. His name was Harold Maladroit III; a great name for a barrister, if you think about it. Anyway, poor old Maladroit didn’t put a whole lot of Sturm und Drang into his teachings, if you know what I mean. He normally arrived fifteen minutes late, shuffling into the classroom like it was the last place on earth he wanted to be. But he was actually a very brilliant and accomplished jurist.
He’d occasionally present us with case studies that were so waterlogged with ambivalence they made your head ache. I stared out the window at the skyline of downtown Seoul and got to thinking about one particular case.
The way Maladroit presented it, a private attorney had gotten a call from a man accused of murdering and then eating twelve people. He went and interviewed the accused, and to his vast surprise discovered a handsome young man, well-dressed, well-groomed, apparently well-educated, cultured, and almost impossibly likable. The attorney was astonished. He was also cautious. They spent five hours talking, because it took that long for the attorney to convince himself he was chatting with somebody far too sane and morally anchored to have committed such outlandishly heinous crimes. The attorney of course agreed to represent him.
The trial date was set for six months hence, and the attorney and his client used every minute of it to build their defense. They worked doggedly, becoming very close, achieving, if not a father-to-son relationship, then something not far from it. The most damning evidence against the accused man was a collection of tiny shards of bones that had been found in the old coal furnace in his cellar. The accused man swore the bones were those of Jackie, his beloved beagle, who’d died about two months before the police came. He’d considered taking the corpse to a pet cemetery, but in an effort to be thrifty decided he’d simply cremate the remains himself. This was before DNA testing, and successive medical tests ended up deadlocked: The bones could’ve been human, or they could’ve been a dog’s.
The attorney believed his client. He put all his considerable legal brilliance into the case. He labored fifteen- hour days, ignored his other clients, borrowed money from the bank to keep his practice going, and worked solely, completely, singly on this case. It became his obsession. He gambled dangerously with his financial future. He traded his entire client base for this one man, this one trial.
The day before the trial opened, the attorney and his client went through their preparations one final time. The attorney was so utterly convinced of his client’s innocence, and was so sure of the fine, wholesome impression he’d make with the jury, that he decided to take a great legal risk. He decided to put his client on the stand. They were rehearsing his testimony when they got to the part where the attorney asked his client about the tiny bone shards in the furnace.
“Oh, those,” the client said with the kind of infectious chuckle the lawyer was sure would warm the hearts of even the most hardhearted jury. “See, I had a dog named Max. A cute little schnauzer, a real great dog. I loved him dearly. He died and so I cremated him.”
The lawyer was gifted, or in this case cursed, with a fly-trap memory. Six months before, his client had told him the dog was named Jackie, only now the name was Max. And before the dog was a beagle; now it was a schnauzer. For the first time, he had grave doubts. If the story about the dog wasn’t true, maybe nothing else was true, either.
He lost a great deal of sleep over the following week. The trial progressed. The prosecutor threw his best punches and the defense lawyer counterattacked with a vengeance. He was superbly prepared. He had a convincing rebuttal for everything. He poked holes of doubt every which way.
On the seventh day, the prosecutor was scheduled to call the witness the defense attorney most dreaded – the police officer who’d performed the initial search of his client’s home. In the backyard, discarded behind some overgrown bushes, the officer had discovered some children’s clothing. A mother who lived four blocks away had identified a red shirt as being the same type her son wore on the very day he disappeared. The boy had been missing for four months.
The clothing could have been hidden there by any Tom, Dick, or Harry who’d passed by, and the shirt might or might not have been her son’s, since it was unmarked, and it was a popular generic brand. But the mere fact that it was there would be very damning with the jury. Everything about the prosecutor’s case was circumstantial, but one thing every criminal lawyer knows is that the weight of two pieces of circumstantial evidence is far greater than the sum of the parts.
The problem for the prosecutor was that he couldn’t introduce the shirt into evidence because in a pretrial ruling the defense attorney had convinced the libertarian judge that since the clothes had been discovered outside the premises of the dwelling, and the search warrant had specified the house itself, they were inadmissible.
The judge, however, wasn’t a complete dolt, so he limited his ruling to say the clothing was inadmissible only so long as the issue of what was discovered outside the home was never raised. The prosecutor was then instructed that he was barred, under any circumstances, from
The quandary was this: The defense attorney was suddenly shattered by self-doubt. He suspected his client had misled and manipulated him for six long months. He just wasn’t sure. He’d built a strong defense. He’d covered every base. He was confident of his ability to neutralize the prosecutor’s case. All the key evidence was either inadmissible or easily refuted.
That is, unless the defense attorney in his cross-examination of the investigating officer inadvertently triggered a discussion about the evidence found outside the house. That would allow the prosecutor to get the shirt introduced as evidence. It would compound the case against his client. It would place his client at great peril. It would also devastate his own legal career, which was hovering on the verge of bankruptcy.
The attorney couldn’t sleep the whole night before. The nice, clean-cut young man he’d come to like so much might actually have murdered and then eaten twelve people, including six young boys. The thought sickened him. To rectify the situation, all he had to do was make one small verbal slip the next day, to allude in any way to the search of the grounds around his client’s home. The prosecutor would hear the slip and pounce.
He was still wrestling with himself when it came his turn to cross-examine the police officer. The officer’s name was Sergeant Curtis Lincoln, a big Black man with deep-set, uncompromising eyes who looked positively tortured, no doubt because the prosecutor’s case was falling apart. The defense attorney got up. He stood for nearly half a minute, so miserably conflicted that he became tongue-tied. The judge called his name three times. He looked at the police officer and Curtis Lincoln stared back searchingly. He looked at his client and the young man stared back even more searchingly.
In that instant, the attorney concluded that his lawyer’s oath took precedence over his own deeply held
