Serial

29

Jefferson City, Missouri, 1991

Vincent Salas’s appointed attorney, Jack Murray, had never before defended a rapist. Alleged rapist. The wily old prosecutor, Maurice Givens, was having fun with the young attorney.

Murray, an affable fellow and not without persuasive powers, had been able to get a change of venue on the grounds that everyone in Hogart and the surrounding county wanted to torture and kill Salas. The jury not only might have been biased, they might have been hard to hold back.

Even with the Jefferson City jury, the trial was going poorly for Murray-and of course for his client, Vincent Salas.

Not that Salas was helping his cause. He’d refused to get a haircut and shave off his beard, and Murray couldn’t talk him into wearing a coat and tie. For some reason Salas had rejected the simple strategy of looking unlike a motorcycle thug who would rape a young housewife.

Salas wore a blue work shirt, a clean pair of Levi’s, and his black engineer’s boots. He’d at least shined the boots. Murray was a little bit proud of having talked him into that.

“Of course,” said Givens in his smooth southern Missouri glide, “the defendant’s real problem is that aaall the evidence points to his guilt.”

Murray was a skinny young blond man with untamable short hair. He leaped to his feet to protest. He seemed to leap when he did everything. Even before his objection, he got a weary “Sustained” from the judge, but the jury had heard. And Murray had to admit, Givens was right about the evidence being a mountain under which Vincent Salas was all but buried.

Now Givens got to the point. He turned to Beth Brannigan, who was dressed in an ankle-length pleated skirt and high-necked white blouse with ruffled trim.

“My dear Mrs. Brannigan,” he said at slightly higher volume, “is the man who raped you present today in this courtroom?”

Beth was so nervous she had to consciously force the words from where they’d stuck in her throat. “Yes, sir. He is.”

“And would you point to him, please.”

Beth’s arm snapped up even though her hand and the finger that pointed were trembling. She was pointing at Vincent Salas, who stared back at her with the mock deadpan expression of a man who knew the deck was stacked, and that he’d had a losing hand even before the cards were dealt.

“Let the record show…” Givens was intoning.

Jack Murray had known from the beginning that the case was hopeless. There had been his client, sleeping and drunk, a few miles from where the victim had been raped, and a few feet from empty beer cans of the brand that had been stolen from her when he’d fled the scene. There was his motorcycle parked nearby, a Harley-Davidson, just as the witness who’d seen him flee had described. There was Murray’s client, dressed as his victim had described. There were scratches on his face, and his victim had described how she’d scratched him.

Now there he was in court, with his dark hair and dark beard, as his victim had described. And the prosecution’s expert witness had already testified how Salas’s blood type was the same as that found at the scene of the rape. From the scratches on his face, no doubt. The ones Salas claimed had been made by a feral cat.

“Ah, the feral-cat defense,” Givens had muttered, barely loud enough for the jury to overhear.

Salas had even figured out a way to make things worse for him. He’d run from the law.

Not just from the law, but from Sheriff Wayne Westerley, who was a hero in the county and had won reelection to his office by a landslide two years ago. Murray had crossexamined Westerley yesterday. The sheriff, a handsome man to begin with, appeared in court wearing his tailored uniform, looking like a movie star, making Murray feel like the paparazzi. Westerley had sat there calmly while the flustered Murray leaped around as if electrified. The contrast wasn’t lost on the jury. When Murray had sneaked a peek at them, he had the distinct impression they thought he was needlessly badgering Westerley, who was merely stating the facts.

At least when Westerley was finished with his devastating testimony and walked past the jury on his way out, no one had asked for his autograph.

What I should have done, Murray thought, was go to engineering school. Built bridges or something. Or maybe done stand-up comedy. A couple of times he’d managed to make the jury laugh.

It helped some that after the guilty verdict, Maurice Givens had taken him aside out in front of the courthouse and told him not to worry, this had been his first murder trial; Murray was young and had the makings of a top-notch trial lawyer.

The next week, after sentencing, Givens again approached Murray outside the courthouse and slapped him on the back. “If the scumbag had anybody else for a lawyer-but me, of course-he’d have gotten fifty-five to sixty.”

Salas had been sentenced to thirty-five years in the state penitentiary in Jefferson City. If he managed to survive, it would seem like an eternity. Murray didn’t feel good about it.

“Don’t be downcast,” Givens had told him in parting. “We both know the bastard’s guilty.”

If Salas was downcast, it was difficult to know it. When he’d been sentenced, he’d worn the same stoic expression he’d displayed when found guilty, almost as if he were bored. Even when Murray visited him later in the lockup and they discussed the appeals process, Salas seemed disinterested. Both men knew where that short road would lead.

Murray told himself that what Givens had related to him outside the courthouse was true. Not just about him having the stuff to become a top-notch trial lawyer, but about Salas’s obvious guilt. The evidence had certainly been there. And Salas had certainly acted like a guilty man. Now it was time simply to go through the process of appeal. Automatic motions that would mean nothing.

Time to chalk this one up to experience and think ahead, Murray told himself. And not just to this evening, when he had a date with a sexy court stenographer.

In two weeks he was going to defend in court some members of an organization called Humane Commandoes, who’d blown up a chicken coop, chickens and all, for no apparent reason. The ACLU wouldn’t touch that one. The commandoes would have Murray as their lawyer.

It had been a small coop. Only a few chickens had died.

Murray figured maybe he had a chance.