“People don’t respect Goodwin.”
“I do.”
“Your respect doesn’t count, Jerry. Your uncle’s picking up the tab.”
“Uncle James?”
Lescroix nodded.
“He’s a good man. Hope he didn’t hock his farm.”
He’s not a good man, Jerry, Lescroix thought. He’s a fool.
Because he thinks there’s still some hope for you. And I don’t give a rat’s ass whether he mortgaged the farm or not. “So, what do you say, Jerry?”
“Well, I guess. Only there’s something you have to know.” Scooting closer, shackles rattling. The young, stubbly face leaned forward and the thin lips leveraged into a lopsided smile.
But Lescroix held up an index finger that ended in a snappy, manicured nail. “Now, you’re going to tell me a big secret, right? That you didn’t kill Patricia Cabot. That you’re completely innocent. That you’ve been framed. That this’s all a terrible mistake. That you just happened to be at the crime scene.”
“I—”
“Well, Jerry, no, it’s not a mistake.”
Pilsett looked uneasily at Lescroix, which was just the way the lawyer loved to be looked at. He was a force, he was a phenomenon. No prosecutor ever beat him, no client ever upstaged him.
“Two months ago — on June second — you were hired by Charles Arnold Cabot to mow his lawn and cart off a stack of rotten firewood near his house in Bentana, the ritziest burgh in Hamilton. He’d hired you before a few times and you didn’t really like him — Cabot’s a country club sort of guy — but of course you did the work and you took the fifty dollars he agreed to pay you. He didn’t give you a tip. You got drunk that night and the more you drank, the madder you got ’cause you remembered that he never paid you enough — even though you never bargained with him and you kept coming back when he called you.”
“Wait—”
“Shhhh. The next day, when Cabot and his wife were both out, you were still drunk and still mad. You broke into the house and while you were cutting the wires that connected their two-thousand-dollar stereo receiver to the speakers, Patricia Cabot came back home unexpectedly. She scared the hell out of you and you hit her with the hammer you’d used to break open the door from the garage to the kitchen. You knocked her out. But didn’t kill her. You tied her up. Thinking maybe you’d rape her later. Ah, ah, ah — let me finish. Thinking maybe you’d rape her later. Don’t gimme that
“Then you got spooked. The woman came to and started to scream. You finished things up with the hammer and started to run out the door. The husband saw you in the doorway with the bloody hammer and the stereo and their CD collection under your arm. He called the cops and they nailed you. A fair representation of events?”
“Wasn’t all their CDs. I didn’t take the Michael Bolton.”
“Don’t ever try to be funny with me.”
Pilsett flicked his earlobe again. “Was pretty much what happened.”
“All right, Jerry. Listen. This’s a small town and people here’re plenty stupid. I consider myself the best defense lawyer in the country but this case is open and shut. You did it, everyone knows you did it, and the evidence is completely against you. They don’t have the death penalty in this state but they’re damn generous when it comes to handing out life terms with no chance for parole. So. That’s the future you’re facing.”
“Yup. And know what it tells me? Tells me
Maybe they weren’t as dumb in Hamilton as he thought.
The young man continued, “You come all the way here from New York. You do the trial and you leave. If you get me off, you’re a celebrity and you get paid and on
Lescroix had to grin. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. That’s one thing I just love about this line of work. No charades between us.”
“What’s charades?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Gotta question.” He frowned.
Take your time…
“Say you was to get me off. Could they come after me again?”
“Nope. That’d be double jeopardy. That’s what’s so great about this country. Once a jury’s said you’re innocent, you’re free, and the prosecutor can’t do diddly…. Come on, you gonna hire me and boot that Goodwin back to the law library, where he belongs?”
He flicked his earlobe again. The chains clinked. “Guess I will.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
Paul Lescroix’s resume had been amply massaged over the years. He’d gone to a city law school at night. Which wouldn’t of course play in the many new stories he fantasized would feature him, so after he graduated he signed up fast for continuing ed courses in Cambridge, which were open to any lawyer willing to pay five hundred bucks. Accordingly the claim that he was “Harvard educated” was true.
He got a job at minimum wage transcribing and filing judicial opinions for traffic court magistrates. So he could say that he’d served his apprenticeship clerking and writing opinions for criminal court judges.
He opened a solo practice above Great Eastern Cantonese carry-out in a sooty building off Maiden Lane in downtown Manhattan. Hence, he became “a partner in a Wall Street firm, specializing in white-collar crime.”
But these little hiccups in the history of Paul Lescroix (all right, originally Paul Vito Lacosta), these little glitches didn’t detract from his one gift — the uncanny ability to decimate his opponents in court. Which is one talent no lawyer can fake. He’d unearth every fact he could about the case, the parties, the judge, the prosecutor, then he’d squeeze them hard, pinch them, mold them like Play-Doh. They were facts still, but facts mutated; in his hands they became weapons, shields, viruses, disguises.
The night before the Pilsett trial, he spent one hour emptying poor Al Goodwin of whatever insights he might have about the case, two hours meeting with reporters and ten hours reviewing two things; the police report, and a lengthy document prepared by his own private investigator, hired three days ago when James Pilsett, Jerry’s uncle, came to him with the retainer fee.
Lescroix immediately noticed that while the circumstantial evidence against Pilsett was substantial, the biggest threat came from Charles Cabot himself. They were lucky of course that he was the only witness but unfortunate that he happened to be the husband of the woman who was killed. It’s a dangerous risk to attack the credibility of a witness who’s also suffered because of the crime.
But Paul Victor Lescroix, Esq., was paid four hundred dollars an hour against five-figure retainers for the very reason that he was willing — no,
Smiling to himself, he called room service for a large pot of coffee and, while murderer Jerry Pilsett and decent Al Goodwin and all the simple folk of Hamilton County dreamt their simple dreams, Lescroix planned for battle.
He arrived at the courtroom early, as he always did, and sat primly at the defense table as the witnesses and spectators and (yes, thank you, Lord, the press) showed up. He mugged subtly for the cameras and scoped out the prosecutor (state U grad, Lescroix had learned, top 40 percent, fifteen years under his belt and numb from being mired in a dead-end career he should have left thirteen years ago).
Lescroix then turned his eyes to a man sitting in the back of the courtroom. Charles Cabot. He sat beside a woman in her sixties — mother or mother-in-law, Lescroix reckoned, gauging by the tears. The lawyer was slightly troubled. He’d expected Cabot to be a stiff, upper-middle-class suburbanite, someone who’d elicit little sympathy from the jury. But the man — though he was about forty — seemed boyish. He had mussed hair, dark blond, and wore a rumpled sports coat and slacks, striped tie. A friendly insurance salesman. He comforted the woman and dropped a few tears himself. He was the sort of widower a jury could easily fall in love with.
Well, Lescroix had been in worse straits. He’d had cases where he’d had to attack grieving mothers and
