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 initiating discussion about the evidence found outside the home. Sounds loopy, but you have to understand that legal rulings have a perverse logic all of their own.
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 personal convictions. He told the judge he had no questions and fell back into his chair.
His client was found not guilty. It was an incredible victory. The press lauded the attorney as the second coming. He was interviewed on talk shows and heralded as the most promising legal mind in the city, probably the state, maybe the whole damned country. Offers poured in from firms promising instant partnerships, from wealthy suspects who wanted to pay top dollar for his services, from publishing houses wanting to ghostwrite his story.
Within a year six more people disappeared. Sergeant Curtis Lincoln got another warrant, did another search, found six sets of bones in the client’s basement, all neatly picked clean of meat. The client was arrested again, and the first thing he did was call the same lawyer.
Most everybody in the class chuckled when old Harold Maladroit III outlined this case. The irony was too excruciating, the story too perfect. It had to be fabricated. It simply couldn’t be true.
I wasn’t chuckling, though. I was watching old Maladroit’s eyes.
As soon as the class was done, I rushed down to the law library and researched for four hours. I finally found the right case; it was named State vs. Homison. It concerned an accused cannibal named William Homison who was brilliantly defended by an attorney named Harold Maladroit III. The reason the case made the law books was because of the groundbreaking argument Maladroit constructed to get the clothing excluded as evidence. No wonder the old coot fled from the practice of law to teach legal ethics.
Like lots of ethical issues faced by lawyers, the lesson of this one took you into all kinds of dark, twisted back alleys. Maladroit had done what his oath required him to do. He’d steamrolled his own conscience and forged ahead. He’d also sentenced six more people to death.
My oath now dictated that I should follow Carlson’s instructions to the letter and do everything in my power to prove my client innocent. Only, if I did, I might help sentence Whitehall to death. There were no guarantees either way, but a lawyer must appease his own sense of right and wrong. All attorneys gamble with the fates and lives of their clients: The trick is to gauge the odds, and make the bet you can live with regardless of the consequences.
The best bet for Whitehall was to pick apart the prosecutor’s case. To do that, though, I needed to learn a great deal more about what had happened. So I got on the phone. I called Imelda and told her to have the case materials delivered to my room at noon. I would’ve told her to bring them up right away, but I intended to be present when Whitehall was transferred from American custody to the Koreans.
Carlson was going to be in for a rude shock, and I needed to be there to stabilize her. I called her next and made an appointment to accompany her to the military holding facility at nine-thirty.
That settled, I flipped on CNN and watched the coverage of the Antigay March on Washington. It was a sobering sight. Over a million marchers participated. There was a very dramatic shot taken at the Mall of a tightly crammed crowd that seemed to stretch off into infinity. There were quick glimpses of one frenzied preacher after another standing at a lectern, haranguing the crowd, and condemning the President, homosexuals, and about anybody who liked or supported either of them.
Thousands of placards were visible. Nearly all of them had a big photograph of a single face. I recognized the face, of course: Thomas Whitehall. The common motto on the signs read ASK, TELL, GO TO HELL, a surprisingly un-Christian sentiment, if you ask me.
By nine-thirty, I was standing at the front entrance of the Dragon Hill Lodge when Katherine appeared beside me. Neither of us said a word. We exchanged cold, surly nods and climbed into the sedan.
A big black paddy wagon and ten sedans filled with Korean police were parked outside the holding facility. The Koreans must’ve been worried about being ambushed by a crowd of angry vigilantes and having Whitehall lynched in the streets of Seoul. It wasn’t reassuring that they had to be concerned about that kind of thing.
Inside, a surprisingly tall, frightfully tough-looking Korean in a cheap-looking black silk suit was standing beside the Army captain in charge of the facility. The Korean had wide, knobby shoulders and a face that was more scuffed and scarred than the inside heels of my shoes. He was signing some papers I assumed were the transfer documents.