I looked at her again. Behind the glasses, her right eye had begun wandering yet another time. I wondered how often that wayward eye had served to enlist sympathy and compassion.
“If I represent you...” I said.
“Yes. Please. Help me, Matthew.”
“...I’d want someone else in my office to do the actual trial work.”
“However you want to do it.”
I nodded.
“Tell me again,” I said. “Did you kill him?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
I nodded again.
“Your first appearance hearing is at eleven this morning,” I said, and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour to talk. Tell me what you were doing on that boat.”
I have to tell you that I frankly believed she was making a mistake. I am very good at gathering facts, I will admit that, I am a total bulldog when it comes to sniffing things out and clamping my jaws on them and shaking them till they yelp. But I really don’t think I have the requisite shark mentality to try a murder case. I’m not being modest. I just don’t think I’m cut out for it. Benny Weiss, admittedly the best criminal lawyer in all Calusa — in fact, maybe in all Florida — once told me that he never asks a person charged with murder whether he committed the crime.
“I don’t care if a client did it or not,” he told me. “I’m only interested in combating the charge against him. So I tell him what the other side has, or what they think they have, and then between us we work out a plan of attack. You’ll notice I did not use the word defense, Matthew. As far as I’m concerned, this is an attack, a relentless attack against forces determined to deprive my client of his constitutional right to liberty, whether he committed the crime or not.”
Well, the way I see it, the Canons of Professional Ethics notwithstanding, which canons grant to a lawyer the right — but not the obligation — to undertake a defense regardless of his personal opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, otherwise an innocent person might God forbid be denied a proper defense and our entire judicial system would go down the drain, provided the jury system doesn’t flush it out to sea first...
But the way I see it, if someone has committed murder — or arson, or armed robbery, or rape, or aggravated assault, or any one of the hundreds of crimes we have designated as affronts to civilization — then he should be punished for that crime. It’s a bromide of the criminal justice system that you’ll never find anyone in prison who’s actually committed the crime that put him there. You won’t find any guilty people in a courtroom, either. That’s because a lawyer got there first. The day I stand in a courtroom and hear a judge ask, “How do you plead?” and hear the accused answer, “Guilty, Your Honor” is the day I will fall down dead in another coma.
Meanwhile, I bequeath to every criminal lawyer in the world anyone who has stabbed his wife or shot his mother or set fire to his girlfriend’s house or poisoned his goldfish or peed in his neighbor’s mailbox.
Me, I won’t defend anyone I think is guilty.
Warren’s friend went by the name of Amberjack James.
He had got the name not because the color of his skin sort of matched the fish’s color — what the rednecks down here used to call “high yeller” back when such shit was still tolerated — but because he’d caught the biggest jack ever fished in the waters off Calusa, a hundred-and-ten-pound beauty that now hung mounted on a plaque in the living room of the small house he shared with a girl much darker than he was but only half his age and a lot prettier. Amberjack was thirty-seven. The girl had just turned eighteen. Less than half his age, actually. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch while Warren and Amberjack sat on the back porch of the house, looking out at the river and the boat Warren hoped to borrow.
Amberjack’s real name...
Or rather the name he’d been born with, or rather the name that had been foisted upon him at birth since nobody — the way he looked at it — was ever born with a name tattooed on his forehead or his belly button, he was just born naked and squawking and helpless till some higher authority put a name on him.
In this case the higher authority happened to be his daddy, and the name he’d put on poor powerless little Amberjack was Harry James. This was in honor of a white trumpet player Amberjack’s daddy admired, he playing the cornet himself, which was a fine tribute, to be sure, if it didn’t so happen that James was also the family name, which made the baby come out Harry James James. Never did amount to much of a horn player, Amberjack’s daddy, but he left Amberjack’s mama a goodly sum of money when he died of cancer at the age of sixty-two, and he’d left Amberjack himself — in addition to the stupid fuckin name — the thirty-foot powerboat from which he’d caught his record fish two years later, thereby leaving behind forever the name of the honky bugler he’d never heard of, anyway.
It was the boat Warren was here to borrow.
“What you gonna do with it?” Amberjack asked.
Both men were drinking Coors beer and munching on fried pork rinds they were plucking out of a red and yellow cellophane bag even though Mercedes had yelled twice from the kitchen to stop snackin less they spoil they appetites. The beer was cold and tasty and the rinds were salty and crisp. It was another scorching-hot day here in Calusa. Warren kept thinking it’d be cooler out on the water, on Amberjack’s boat. The boat was tied up at a ramshackle wooden dock that thrust out into a narrow canal. The shallow water here near the shore was choked with green. The air was still.
“I just need to borrow it for a few days,” Warren said.
“For what?”
“Something I have to do.”
“Something legal?”
“Come on, Am, I’m a licensed P.I.”
“Cause, nigger, I got to tell you. You use my boat to run any kind of controlled substance up onto the beach...”
“This is nothing like that, Am.”
“Then answer my question. Is what you plan to do with my boat legal?”
“Yes, it’s legal,” Warren said, lying in that what he had in mind wasn’t strictly legal. Not that anyone would condemn him for doing it. Still, it was Am’s boat, and he had every right to ask Warren what he planned to do with it, just as Warren had every right to lie about his plans.
“You even know how to run a boat?” Amberjack asked.
“Oh, sure,” Warren said.
“Where you gonna take this boat?”
“Out on the Gulf.”
“How far out?”
“Twenty, thirty miles.”
“Better not go any further’n that,” Amberjack said. “She holds a hundred gallons of gas, burns about ten gallons an hour, so plan accordingly. I usually figure I can go a hun’ forty miles on a tank of gas.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“What’s out on the Gulf?”
“Thought I’d do some fishing.”
“Maybe I’ll go with you.”
“I feel the need for solitude, Am.”
“You takin some woman out there with you?”
Warren smiled.
“What I figured all along,” Amberjack said, and returned the smile. “Don’t get too busy you miss any hurricane coming. There’s a good radio on the boat, you keep it tuned to either channel one or channel three. You hear anything sounds like weather, you head right back in, hear?”
“I told you, I’ll be careful.”
“Never mind careful. You turn around and haul ass the minute you hear any kind of Coast Guard warnin.”