Read Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller for Free Online

prosecutor's elbow and steered him firmly to the judge's bench, where he began to explain where they stood with Gillis.
    The judge interrupted him. "Let's cut the baloney, I want to quit by two o'clock today. How about sixty days jail time and five years probated?"
    Altschuler frowned. He hated to lose, even in something as minor as a DWI.
    Elated, Warren went back to his client. He produced papers to sign: a waiver of indictment and of other constitutional rights. Gillis scrawled his name and then, without a word, turned his head away.
    It was 9:35. At the court coordinator's desk, Warren filled in a voucher for his $150 fee. What he had done would make no headlines. He could do it ten times a week, if he was lucky enough to get that many appointments, and it would never make him rich. But he had helped a man — there was something to be said for that. He wished Gillis had thanked him.
    Any sense of accomplishment vanished an hour later. He had a sentencing in another court, this time by a judge who had hitherto been a dedicated prosecutor. Warren's current client, with two prior misdemeanors for possession of marijuana, had been indicted for molesting a minor. He was black, nineteen, a high-school dropout who could barely read or write more than his own name.
    Warren had entered a plea of nolo contendere. Now he made his closing speech. "Your honor, this youngster with an eighth grade education is mentally incompetent. We can't unscramble the egg. Of what benefit to society is incarceration? He has a family that's willing to take care of him and get him a simple job. I submit that to place him in confinement is neither just nor compassionate, and it isn't productive for the community."
    The judge gave the boy eight years.
    One for every year of his schooling, Warren realized. He left the courtroom feeling whipped. These were his days: win some, lose some — a bit of triumph here, a bit of failure there. Troubled dreams, scattered lives he would never touch again. He dealt with young men who were bewildered, or vicious, or grossly ignorant, or beaten down by life. If you were a lawyer, man could be an unlovely species. There was no glory here.
    ===OO=OOO=OO===
    Glory, with all its attendant penalties, had first come to Warren when he was twelve years old. The Blackburn family had lived on a street called Bellefontaine that dead-ended on the Shamrock Hilton Hotel, then the center of the city's social activity. In summer, together with other professional families, the Blackburns rented a lanai room around the huge hotel pool with its ten- and twenty-meter diving boards. What every boy wanted was to become brave and strong enough to dive off the twenty-meter board, but all were forbidden until they reached sixteen.
    At the age of twelve, Warren said to his friends, "Watch this…" He climbed the metal ladder to stare down at the green surface, thinking that it hadn't looked nearly that high from poolside. His knees were trembling, but he launched himself out in a belly whopper, careened through the air, hit the water, and split his cheek so badly that it required five stitches.
    Maximum Gene grounded him for two weeks.
    After school Warren and Rick Levine would climb on their bikes and pedal down to the Shamrock for the conventions. At the funeral directors' convention Warren lay down in four different coffins. He begged one of the directors to embalm him: "Y' know, just to see what it'd be like…"
    Air France stewardesses sunbathed topless at the Shamrock pool. The Frenchwomen liked those Texas boys who were not afraid to come up and say, "Hi, y'all,
comment allez-vous?"
There was a kind of glory there too, Warren found.
    He was a curious mixture of sophistication and country ways. His paternal grandfather, a snuff-dipping shoe store owner, had always rolled his own cigarettes from bags of Duke's Mixture. When the weekend came, Maximum Gene himself drove about town in a Ford pickup that dangled furry dice from the rearview