The Last Innocent Man

David did a double take when his office door opened. Gault laughed. He loved to shock people, and his appearance provided a low-grade jolt. Below the neck Gault looked the same. It was his head that had changed. His long brown hair had been shorn off, leaving a gleaming skull, and his upper lip sported a Fu Manchu mustache.

“Jesus!” David said, to Gault’s delight. “Have you taken up professional wrestling?”

“I’m changing my image,” Gault answered with a grin.

“Sit down,” David said, shaking his head. “What brings you to town?”

“The book. My editor wants me to beef up the final chapters, so he suggested that I get a little more of your thinking about the trial.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I don’t know. It was his idea. What you ate the morning of the main event. Who does your clothes. Think of something. After all, I’m doing the work, but you’re getting part of the profits. Take an interest.”

“Tom, I have no idea what would interest your readers. Give me a hint.”

“You ever play any sports in high school or college?”

David shrugged.

“I ran a little track in college and wrestled some.”

“Okay. Why don’t you tell me how trying a case compares to the feeling you get just before a sporting event. How’s that?”

David thought for a few minutes before answering.

“I don’t think they’re that similar,” David said. “Winning or losing at sports depends on your performance during the sporting event, but a lawyer can’t win a case at trial. Or, anyway, not usually.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the facts of each case are determined by the time the case gets to you. All the facts might not be revealed, but they’re there. So a lawyer wins his case before trial by finding out, through investigation, what the facts are. A lawyer can’t change the facts, but once he knows what the facts are, he can deal with them. Try to get the jury to look at them in a certain way. And there is usually more than one way to look at the facts.

“A few years back I represented a man who tried to hold up a minimart. He walked in with a shotgun and told the manager to give him the money or he would kill him. The manager was a feisty little guy, and he whipped out a handgun and shot my client through the neck. When the police arrived, my man was lying in a pool of blood holding the gun, and there were five eyewitnesses who swore that he tried to rob the place. The DA charged my client with armed robbery. Those were the facts I started with. Want to guess the verdict?”

Gault smiled.

“It has to be not guilty, but how did you do it?”

“There were other facts we didn’t know about when we started. When they took the defendant to the hospital for surgery, they took a blood sample. One of the routine checks the hospital makes before performing surgery is to find out how much alcohol a person has in his system. My man was loaded. He had consumed so much alcohol that I was able to get two prominent psychiatrists to testify that a person in his condition would not be able to form the intent to commit the crime, and the district attorney must prove intent as one of the elements of the crime of armed robbery.

“The next step was to find out why my client drank like that. It turned out that his wife had died and he had gone to pieces. When I got him, he was already an alcoholic.

“Finally, we had to figure out why he had been at the minimart in the first place. My investigator asked around, and it turned out that our boy had been blotto that day. Two of his buddies had planned the robbery and sent him inside. He was so drunk, he didn’t know what he was doing. In fact, he doesn’t remember what happened to this day.

“When we presented all the facts to the jury, they acquitted. It wasn’t what we did at trial, but the investigation before trial, that mattered. Getting the facts, then presenting them in a favorable light at trial.”

“And is that what you did in the case of State versus Thomas Ira Gault? Manipulate the facts?” Gault asked with an impish grin.

David looked straight at Gault without smiling. The question had caught him off guard.

“Yes,” he answered.

“You know, David,” Gault said, “there is something I’ve always wanted to ask you. All the time you were defending me, and doing such a bang-up job, what did you think? Guilty or innocent? Tell me.”

“Guilty,” David said without a moment’s hesitation. Gault threw back his head and laughed loudly.

“Terrific. And you still worked your ass off. David, old buddy, you are a pro. Now, do you want to know something?” Gault asked in a conspiratorial tone.

“What?”

“Is that attorney-client thing-the privilege-is that still in effect?”

David nodded, very tense.

“Anything I tell you is secret, right? No police, nobody else finds out, right?”

David nodded again. Gault leaned back in his seat and grinned.