The Last Innocent Man

“I owe this man my life,” Gault roared. “This man is the king. And I am going to get him so drunk tonight he won’t be able to defend anyone for a year. Now, any of you suckers who want to join us, form a line. I have enough booze back at my place to get even a reporter drunk. So let’s get going.”

Gault grabbed David with one arm and draped the other over the shoulders of the thin, attractive woman from NBC. David knew it was useless to try to bow out. The crowd swept him along. On the courthouse steps David caught a glimpse of Norman Capers getting into a car parked a block away. David envied him his solitude and his clear conscience.

2

It was an old wooden door. The type you expected to find in a high-school classroom. Long ago someone had painted the windowpane in the upper half a light green to give the occupants of the room more privacy. The lock still worked, but the mechanism was slightly out of line. The door opened with a metallic click, and David looked up from his file. A teenage girl dressed in a dirty white T-shirt and ill-fitting jeans hesitated in the doorway. Monica Powers, the deputy district attorney, stood protectively behind her.

“This is Mr. Nash, Jessie,” Monica said. David stood. Detective Stahlheimer continued to work on the tape recorder at the far end of the wooden table. It was hot and humid outside, but it was cool in the room. The wire mesh in the room’s only window threw crisscross shadow patterns across the detective’s broad back.

“Mr. Nash represents Tony Seals,” Monica continued. The girl looked puzzled.

“T.S.,” Monica said, and Jessie nodded. David watched her carefully. She was nervous, but not afraid. He imagined that she would never be afraid again, after what she had been through.

The girl interested him. Nothing about her suggested that she was a survivor. Her body was loose and sloppy. She wasn’t ugly. “Plain” was a better word. Unkempt strands of brown hair straggled down past her shoulders. The shoulders were rounded and the arms heavy. David would have picked her to fail, to fold under pressure. She hadn’t. There was steel there, someplace. A fact worth noting when he began to prepare his cross-examination.

“Mr. Nash wants you to tell him what happened on the mountain. He’ll probably ask you some questions, too.”

“Do I have to?” the girl asked. She looked tired. “I’ve said it so many times.”

“But not to me, Jessie,” David said in a firm, quiet tone.

“And why should I tell you…help you, after what they done to me?” she challenged. There was no whine in her voice. No adolescent stubbornness. Monica had told him she was sixteen. It was an old sixteen. A runaway for the past year and a half. Then, this. Life had leapfrogged her over adolescence.

“So I can find out what happened.”

“So you can get him off.”

“If there’s a way to do it. That’s my job, Jessie, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But lawyers usually don’t get guilty people off, and I want to find out what happened so I can decide whether to tell T.S. to go to trial or plead guilty or what. Only I won’t be able to tell him one way or the other if I don’t hear your version of what happened.”

Jessie looked down at her sneakers, thinking. It was working, David thought. His power over people. The ability to persuade. The trick he had used so many times was now as natural a part of him as his arm.

At thirty-five, David still looked open and honest, like a little boy at an American Legion oratorical contest. Jurors trusted him. When he looked them in the eye and told them that his client was innocent, they believed him. When he told a witness, like Jessie Garza, that he was interested only in finding out the truth, they spoke to him. More than once David had seen the shock on the face of a witness as something innocently revealed during an interview was used to destroy the prosecutor’s case.

Jessie shrugged and walked over to a chair near Detective Stahlheimer, turning her back to David.

“I don’t care,” she said. She didn’t say anything else, David noted. She knew the routine.

“I think it’s ready,” Stahlheimer said. Monica sat down across from David and beside the girl. She was immaculately dressed, in a double-breasted charcoal-pinstripe cutaway jacket, a matching skirt, and a cream-colored, ruffle-front blouse. Monica looked more beautiful now than she had when they were married. Their eyes met for a moment; then David looked away. He always felt a bit uncomfortable when he had a case with Monica. Their divorce had been relatively amicable, but being in her presence stirred up feelings of guilt best left buried.

“This is Detective Leon Stahlheimer,” the detective said into the mike. “It’s Thursday, June sixteenth. The time is ten-oh-sevenA.M. I am present in a conference room at the Juvenile Detention Center for the purpose of an interview with the victim in an attempt murder. Present are Jessie May Garza, Deputy District Attorney Monica Powers, and David Nash, the attorney for Anthony Seals.”