Crime Spells Part 9

I'm still digging through tomes, trying to find something to get my client off. He's not so hypothetical any more. Although I am going to have to impress a few people.

People I don't really want to impress.

People who may not be people at all.

I only caught the case because I didn't escape quickly enough from Judge Lewandowski's courtroom. I'd been there to argue against remand for a repeater, even though I knew all of Chicagoland would be better off if he went to prison for life.

That's what I do. I defend the defenseless. At least, that's what I tell the newspapers when they ask, or that schmo at a c.o.c.ktail party who thinks he'll get the better of a seasoned public defender.

Mostly I do it because I like to argue, and I like to win against impossible odds. I'm not one of the liberal-hippie types who gravitates to the PD's office to save the planet; I'm not even sure I believe everyone is ent.i.tled to a fair trial.

What I do believe is that everyone is ent.i.tled to the best defense I can provide-given that I have hundreds of other active cases, only twenty-four hours in my day, and no real budget to hire a legal a.s.sistant.

Which was actually what I was thinking about as I slipped into the bench two rows back from the defense table to repack my briefcase before heading down to the hot dog carts on California Avenue.

"John Lundgren."

Hearing my name intoned by the judge after my case had already been gaveled closed was not a good sign. I looked up so fast my notes almost slipped off my lap. I caught them but lost the briefcase. It thudded against the gray tile floor.

"Yes, Judge," I said, standing up, even though my entire day's work was lying in a mess around me.

The judge was peering at me through her half-gla.s.ses. She looked tired and disgusted all at the same time. "You'll represent Mr. Palmer."

I glanced around, trying to figure out what I'd missed. The courtroom was filled with attorneys waiting for their cases to be called, a few witnesses and even fewer victims, and a couple of defendants who had probably made a previous case's bail.

"Now," the judge said.

The one place I hadn't looked was the defense table. A scruffy man with long black hair stood behind it, his shoulders hunched forward. He wore a trench coat covered with soot, burn marks, and not a few holes.

I slid out of my bench, leaving my briefcase on the floor and grabbing only a yellow legal pad, knowing that no one else would pick up my mess. Unlike TV lawyers, real lawyers are so overwhelmed they don't dig through each other's briefcases, hoping for the one nugget of information that will make or break the trial of the century.

Not that I'd ever handled a client involved in the trial of the century. Or even one involved in the trial of the year.

"You must be Mr. Palmer," I said as I dropped my legal pad on the defense table.

Palmer didn't even look at me. His face was covered in soot and a three-day beard. He smelled like gasoline and smoke.

I didn't even have to guess what he was charged with. It was as obvious as the stench of his clothes.

The prosecutor-some new twit who looked like he was wearing his father's suit-rustled his papers together. "Mr. Richard Palmer is charged with arson in the first degree, attempted arson in the second degree, and sixteen counts of murder in the first degree."

"Mr. Lundgren, how does your client plead?"

I looked at my client, but he didn't look at me. The smell was so overwhelming, my eyes were watering.

"Mr. Lundgren?"

"Mr. Palmer?" I said softly. "What do you want to plead?"

Palmer kept his head down.

"Mr. Lundgren," the judge said, "I asked you a question."

Well, Palmer wasn't talking. I wasn't even sure he was present and accounted for. But if he was like 99.9% of my clients, his plea would be simple, no matter what the evidence against him.

"Not guilty, Your Honor," I said.

"See?" she muttered. "That wasn't hard, now was it? Bail, counselor?"

She was looking at the young prosecutor. His hands were shaking.

"Since Mr. Palmer is accused of burning down one of the largest mansions on the Gold Coast, your honor, and killing all sixteen people inside, we're asking for remand."

He made it sound like they'd ask for more if they could get it.

I opened my mouth, but the judge brought down her gavel so hard it sounded like a gunshot.

"Remand," she said. "Next case."

And with that, I became responsible for Richard Mark Harrison Palmer the Third.

Or at least, for his legal defense.

Every last bit of it.

It took hours before I could get to the Cook County Jail to see my brand-new client. By then, he was in prison blues. Someone had washed his face, and, surprisingly, there were no burns beneath all that soot.

I'd represented arsonists before, many of whom smelled just as Palmer had when he was brought to court, and they were always covered with burns or s.h.i.+ny puckered burn scars.

They were also bug-eyed crazy. Something about staring at fire made their eyes revolve in their skulls-rather like the eyes of someone who'd taken too much LSD over too long a period of time.

But this guy didn't look crazy. He didn't give off the crazy vibe either, the one that always made me stand near the door so that I could pound it for a guard and then get the h.e.l.l out of the way if I needed to.

Palmer sat at the scratched table, his head down, his hands folded before him. His hair was wet and he smelled faintly of industrial soap.

"Mr. Palmer." I sat down across from him, set my briefcase on the table, and snapped the top open so that it stood like a s.h.i.+eld between us. "I don't know if you remember me. I'm John Lundgren, your court-appointed public defender."

"I don't need you." His voice was deep, his accent so purely Chicago that the sentence sounded more like a mushy version of I doon need yoo.

"I'm afraid you do, Mr. Palmer. You charged with some serious capital crimes, and it was pretty clear that Judge Lewandowski doesn't believe you can handle it on your own. So she a.s.signed me-"

"And I'm una.s.signing you. Go away." He looked up as he said that, and I was stunned to see intelligence in his blood-shot brown eyes.

I sighed. I always hated clients who argued with me, clients who believed they knew more about the legal system than I did.

Or worse, clients who somehow believed they could go up against Chicago 's finest prosecutors all by themselves.

"I'm not charging you, Mr. Palmer," I said. "The county pays my salary to represent people who can't afford their own attorney."

"I don't want an attorney," he said.

I sighed again. It was always a nightmare to go before the judge-any judge-and say that my indigent client wants me off the case in favor of his own counsel. Usually I'd have to sit in anyway, advise the stupid client on matters of the law (or, as I'd privately say, matters on which he was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up royally).

"It's better to have one," I said, "especially when you're facing sixteen counts of premeditated murder. You want to tell me what happened?"

Usually that ploy worked. The client forgot his belligerence and wanted to brag. Or to defend himself. Or make excuses.

A lot of my colleagues never wanted to know what the client believed he did, but I always figured the more information I had, the better. That way, I wouldn't get blindsided by my own client's idiocy in the middle of trial.

"No, I don't want to tell you what happened," Palmer said. "I think it would be better if you leave."

I closed my briefcase. "You're not going to be rid of me that easily. I will remain your attorney until we can go to court to sever the relations.h.i.+p, and then the judge is going to want to know all kinds of things, like what kind of preparation you have to represent yourself. And frankly, Mr. Palmer, I'd be remiss if I didn't-"

"Tell me how stupid I'm being for taking this on alone, I know." He gave me half a smile. It was condescending. I'd never met an arsonist capable of being condescending before. "But you're the one who pleaded me not guilty."

"You weren't exactly talking," I said. "I even gave you a moment to give me some kind of response, and you didn't say a word. So I gave my standard answer. Not guilty. We can always modify the plea later. Do you have medical records that would show mental health treatments-"

"I wasn't going to plead out to a mental defect," he said.

My hand froze on top of the briefcase. "You were going to plead guilty? Why in the h.e.l.l would you do that, Mr. Palmer?"

He shrugged. "It seemed like the only thing to do."

"Look, I don't know the details of your case, Mr. Palmer. The file hasn't come up to our offices yet. So I don't know what they have on you. But let me tell you, I've seen some supposedly tight police cases unravel in court. It might look hopeless now, but I can a.s.sure you that with good counsel we should be able to fight this. So let me-"

"I'm not suicidal or stupid," he said. "I have no defense."

I'd heard that before too, usually from guilty clients who felt remorse.

"I'll decide that," I said, and flicked the locks on the briefcase so the top popped open again. I pulled out the legal pad that had Palmer's name on it and indictment scrawled almost illegibly in my handwriting. "Just tell me your side of the events."

"The events, Mr. Lundgren?" He raised his eyebrows at me. I had a sense that I have had only rarely, that I was sitting across from someone with an intellect more formidable than mine.

"Where were you? What happened? What exactly are they accusing you of? That kind of thing."

"You heard what they're accusing me of. They think I burned down the Brickstone mansion and killed everyone inside."

I hadn't known it was the Brickstone mansion. When I was an undergrad at Northwestern, my buddies and I used to climb over the ivy-and-moss covered stone fence onto the three-block expanse of yard owned by the Brickstones. We'd walk to the edge of Lake Michigan, plop behind a group of giant rocks that blocked that section of the sh.o.r.e from the mansion proper, and proceed to get very drunk. We'd see who could drink the most and still be awake for sunrise.

Usually that would be me.

"The Brickstone mansion," I repeated, trying to put this together. "They say you burned it down?"

I expected him to tell me that was a figure of speech. In fact, so convinced was I that that was going to be his next sentence that I almost missed his actual one: "To the ground." His tone was dry. "Nothing left but charred remains."

I frowned at him. That made no sense. The Brickstone mansion was in Chicago 's city limits-and any building in the city limits had to be made of stone. The famous Chicago Fire left its legacy: No building could be made of combustible materials.

And I'd seen the Brickstone mansion. It was well named. It was made of a kind of white stone you didn't find outside of the Midwest, but the wealthy in Chicago seemed to adore it. Each "brick" was the size of an armchair, and when I looked at them one drunken dawn, those giant stones gleamed whitely in the light of the rising sun.

"Did you see it?" I asked. "What was left?"

"Of course I saw it," he said. That look was making me uncomfortable. I was beginning to feel as if I truly was dumber than he was.

"And was it burned to the ground?"

"Nothing left except rubble," he said.

"You smelled of gasoline when I met you, Mr. Palmer," I said.

He shrugged.

"Gasoline fires burn hot."

He looked down.

"But they can't melt stone. You want to tell me what's going on?"

He lifted his head. His mouth was open slightly, as if he hadn't expected real thought from me. "I burned down the Brickstone mansion," he said. "Killing everyone inside."

I no longer believed him. "How?"

"What do you want me to do? Say I waved my magic wand, brought down lightning from the heavens into a puddle of magicked up gasoline, and caused the building to explode?"

It was my turn to shrug. "That's about the only thing that would reduce that white brick mansion to rubble."

"Well, then," he said, crossing his arms. "That's exactly what I did."

We left it at that. I couldn't get him to tell me anything else, and I didn't really try, because he seemed to have dumped the idea of firing me. He didn't exactly say I could stay, but he nodded when I said I'd be back after I had a chance to review the file.

I took that as a change of heart. We were now attorney and client, whether either of us liked it or not.

So I went back to the office in hopes of finding the file. It was on my desk along with six other brand-new case files, eight old case files, and the seven cases I'd been trying desperately to plead out. My office was a graveyard of active files. They trailed off my desk to boxes on the floor, accordion files on my chair, and half-opened file cabinet drawers beneath my window.

I wasn't exactly overworked. Overworked would mean that I had some free time to look forward to. My workload was impossible, which made it exactly like everyone else's workload inside the Public Defender's office.

Which meant that the minute I saw all those piles of paper, I should have forgotten about Palmer. But I didn't. In fact, I grabbed his file first.

It was incomplete. A lot of the paperwork had little typed notations TK which, oddly enough, meant "to come" (I always thought: shouldn't that be TC? Probably too close to TLC, something the police department did not believe in.) A few sticky notes explained that the doc.u.mentation was being copied, and one handwritten note said that the arson squad planned to finish its investigation tomorrow and would have a detailed report by the end of the week.

And pigs would fly out of my b.u.t.t.

But I made do with what I had. I often got incomplete files, especially on cases as new as this one. Sometimes the police department felt they'd done enough and would "forget" to update me. So every morning, I made a list of cases that needed additional material, and I'd talk to a clerk, who'd talk to a squad leader, who'd talk to a detective, who would sigh and fill out the necessary paperwork.

The more times I had to do that, the more the detective got irritated at me, so that by the time we went to court, I was usually as big a bad guy in the detective's eyes as the person he arrested. Fortunately for me, detectives, while smart, aren't all that articulate, and I can-if I choose-slice one of them into tiny little pieces on the stand.

I don't always choose. Because if I do, that detective and his buddies'll be gunning for me on the next case. So I reserve such treatment for special cases.

I had a hunch this was one those.