But he wasn’t a model officer. He raped dead people.

“So,” Whitehall asked, intensely studying me right back, “where do you come from, Major?”

“I’m assigned to a court just outside Washington. An appeals court.”

That was a lie, but I had my reasons for misleading him.

“Have you ever defended an accused murderer before?”

“A few times.”

“How about rape?”

“Plenty.”

“Necrophilia?”

“No. None. Never.”

“Then we have something in common.”

“Really? And what could that possibly be, Captain?” I nastily replied, thinking we had nothing at all in common, except we were both in the Army. And we were both males. Well, he was sort of a male. Maybe.

“I’ve never been accused of necrophilia before,” he assured me with a very bitter smile on his lips.

“You went to West Point?” I asked, avoiding that with a ten-foot pole.

“Class of ’91.”

“Are you gay?” I asked, deliberately diving right into it, a neat little lawyer’s trick I’d learned, because I suspected he wouldn’t be truthful and I wanted to see if the quick leap made him blush, or stammer, or emit some nonverbal clue that betrayed his true sexual druthers.

I needn’t have bothered.

“In fact, I am,” he said, sounding unaffected, like he wasn’t embarrassed by it. Then he quickly added, “But you’re not allowed to disclose that. Since you’re my attorney, you’re bound by attorney-client privilege, and I’ll tell you what you can and can’t divulge.”

“And what if Miss Carlson and I decide an admission of sexual preference is in your best interest?”

Katherine was looking at me with a queasy expression, and it suddenly struck me what was going on here.

Whitehall said, “I’ll reiterate again, Major. I’ll tell you what you can and can’t disclose. I was first in my class in military law at West Point, and like many gay soldiers, I’ve continued to study the law a great deal since. My life and career are on the line.”

“Are you unhappy with us?” I asked. “Do you lack confidence in our abilities?”

“No, I guess you’ll do fine. Just say I’m confident in my own judgment and abilities and leave it at that.”

Katherine was now nervously running a hand through that long, black, luxurious hair of hers. Her eyes were darting around at some invisible specks on the ceiling like the last thing she wanted to do was look at my face.

There’s a term used in prisons:“jailhouse lawyer.” The Army has its own version, “barracks lawyer.” Both refer to a specific kind of foolish creature who stuffs his nose inside a few law books and suddenly thinks he’s been reincarnated as Clarence Darrow or Perry Mason. They’re a real lawyer’s worst nightmare, because all of a sudden your client thinks he’s smarter than you, which he very well might be, only he lacks a few essentials called experience and education, and in any regard is trying to transform a worm’s-eye view of the world into an all-encompassing galactic perspective.

The great danger with barracks lawyers is that they very often don’t comprehend their own gaping shortcomings until the words “guilty as charged” come tumbling out of the jury foreman’s lips. Even then, some don’t learn. Appeals court dockets are overloaded with motions launched by barracks lawyers, who graduate into jailhouse lawyers, who continue to believe the only reason they lost was because of the bungling attorney who took up space at the defense table with them.

I said, “Do I take it that you intend to direct the defense?”

“Mostly, yes,” he said. “On all key decisions, I expect you to confer with me. And I have the final vote.”

The law certainly gave him this authority, and by Katherine’s pained expression I guessed this topic had already been broached at some length with our client. I decided not to press. Whitehall didn’t know me, or trust me, so I wasn’t likely to disabuse him at this early stage in our relationship. Depending on how full of himself he was, or how our relationship matured, maybe I’d never disabuse him.

I merely said, “You certainly have that right.”

He said, “I know.”

“May I ask a few questions pertaining to the case?”

“Uh… all right,” he answered, as though he were doing me some big favor.

“What was your position on base?”

“The headquarters company commander.”

“And how long were you in that position?”

“Eleven months. I’m on a one-year rotation. I was scheduled to change command in one more month.”

“How were your ratings?”

“Outstanding. All of my ratings, my whole career, have always been outstanding.”

“Uh-huh,” I murmured, making a mental note to check that. Lots of officers lie and tell you they’ve got outstanding records, and because their personnel jackets are kept in sealed files in D.C., the layman has no way of checking. I’m not a layman, though. I’m a lawyer. I can check.

I asked, “So what were you and First Sergeant Moran, Private Jackson, and Lee No Tae doing at that apartment?”

He relaxed back against the wall. “They were my friends. I know officers aren’t supposed to mingle with enlisted troops, but none of them were under my command. I figured it was harmless. I invited them over for a party.”

“Could you elaborate on the nature of your friendship? Exactly what does that word mean to you?”

“You mean… was I romantically involved with them?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

He quickly bent forward. “You haven’t tried any gay cases before, have you?”

“Nope,” I admitted. “This is my first.”

“In gay cases, Major, always direct your question more narrowly. Some gays are wildly promiscuous. Romantic entanglements can be irrelevant, even undesirable. You must always ask, was there a physical relationship, because often that’s all there was.”

Whitehall then studied me very carefully to see how I’d respond. I had the sense there was something here that was very weighty to him. He’d just lectured me on a point of law as though I were a first-year law student, so there was the matter of one-upsmanship to contend with. But he’d also made a somewhat provocative claim about gays – was this some kind of test?

At any rate, I coldly said, “Point taken. Did you have either a romantic or physical relationship with any of those men?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he bent farther forward, placed his elbows on his knees, and said, “Tell me something, Major. I’ve read that some defense attorneys would rather not know if their clients are guilty or innocent. In the dark, they give every client every benefit of the doubt. They throw their hearts and souls into the defense. Do you subscribe to that theory?”

“Nope. I sure don’t.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, any decent defense attorney puts his feelings aside. For a second, it diffuses your strategy. If you believe your client’s innocent, you spend all your time trying to prove that to everybody else. If you know or suspect he’s guilty, you spend every second trying to invalidate or hinder the prosecutor’s case. It’s like what they taught you in military art about focusing the main effort on a battlefield, and economizing elsewhere. We’ve only got two weeks here. We can’t afford to be diffused.”

“But tell me truthfully. If you thought I was guilty of these crimes – murder, rape, necrophilia, engaging in homosexual acts, consorting with enlisted troops – would you put your heart and soul into my defense?”

“I’ve taken an oath as an officer of the court to provide you the most able defense I can offer.”

That was a rhetorical sidestep and he knew it. And that seemed to tell him something important, because he leaned back against the wall and his expression got suddenly chilly.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the way we’ll work this. You go find out everything you can. Collect the facts, analyze what you’ve got, then come back to me with your questions.”

“Will you answer them?” I asked.