THE FOURTH WATCH (3 page)

"Miss Whorley ... " I started, but then I
heard a soft whimper, and when she looked back up at me her
beautiful eyes were welling up with tears. I felt an ache right in
the center of me.

"They killed him Mr. Knight ... "

"Who?"

" .. .I don't know who they are, or why they
did it, but my father didn't fall and hit his head and roll into
the pool and drown. If he drowned in that pool someone helped him
do it and 1 could never just let that go. My father was the most
generous, kindest man that I have ever known. I don't know why
people do the things they do, but someone killed him and I have to
find out...I need to find out ... " She lowered her face into her
hands and her shoulders trembled as she cried. Her voice wasn't
raised, and she wasn't buggy-eyed crazy or anything even remotely
like it. She was just a beautiful woman weeping softly and near a
breaking point, and I knew I could never say no to her.

I remember the grief. Remember it well. My
wife ... I... No, no, I thought, and I pushed it away for another
time. I wouldn't think about it, Oh Christ, couldn't even think
about thinking about it, please God, and then it went, but as it
went away it dragged across me like hooks.

''Miss Whorley ... Carolyn ... please, take it
easy," I said and pushed a box of tissue across the desk to
her.

She pulled one from the top of the box and
cried almost soundlessly into it. When at last her head came up
again, she had some of her composure back. "1 need you to help me
find the people who killed my father," she said simply. "The police
won't help, they don't believe me, they pat me on the head and look
at me with sad eyes, and they tell me it was all just a tragic
accident. But I know it's not true, and I know that my father must
have some rights or something, even if he is dead."

He did. I was thinking that anyone with a few
hundred million bucks, dead or alive, had all kinds of rights, and
even if he didn't, could afford all kinds of boutique lawyers to
create and allege some. And I was wondering how my very
non-boutique, one-man, no-horse law firm, such as it was, happened
to catch the attention of such a person, or his heirs, successors
or assigns, when she said: "Alex Andreason said you would help
me."

‘
Ah ha,’ I almost said.

Arthur Alexander Andreason. Alex the Cat.
Speaking of boutique lawyers. For six hundred dollars an hour Alex
and his firm could make all your legal dreams come true. He was a
shark, a brilliant legal mind, a courtroom general, a ruthless
opponent, connected politically in all the right places, and my
former roommate at law school, with whom, once upon a time, I had
closed bars relentlessly. Admittedly this type of work was not up
his alley.

"Did he?" I said.

She nodded and wiped her nose and took a deep
breath. She dug a checkbook out of her handbag, plucked a pen out
of a coffee mug full of them on the corner my desk.

Now she was going to try to seduce me with
money. That always worked. "You know, Ms. Whorley ... "

"Carolyn. "

"Carolyn, there's not a lot to go on here. I
can do a little poking around, get my investigator to go over the
coroner’s report and so on, but if this is just ... "

''It isn't."

"…a tragic accident… "

"Then I'll know I did everything I could to
make sure."

“
Okay.”

"But this was not just a tragic accident, Mr.
Knight ... "

"Mike."

" ... and I want you to find out who killed my
father," she said and tore the check out of her checkbook and
passed it across to me. "There's twenty-five thousand dollars. I
want you to get to the bottom of this thing, find them, make the
police arrest them, make the state prosecute them, I don't care
what it costs. When that's gone, I'll give you more, just find
them."

I took the check in my hands and looked at it
with all its lovely zeros, written in a small, cramped hand, the
biggest retainer check I'd ever taken. Somehow I didn't drool on
it. For twenty-five thousand dollars she would have seen a junior
associate at Andreason, Mallack, Windsor & Spree, and half of
it would have been gone before she got back on the elevator. Here
at the Law Offices of Michael J. Knight, however, twenty five large
would buy a great deal of my time and effort. "We1l if Alex said
I'd help you then I guess he must think it's worth the effort.
Let's see what I can find out."

"Thank you, Mike," she said, her beautiful
green eyes swimming, her lovely face still damp from her tears. She
took one of my cards, and wrote her phone number and address on the
back of another, then we shook hands and she was gone. Her perfume
lingered after her. I sat there behind my scarred old desk in the
medium sized rectangle that was my office and drank the scent of it
in, and wondered if I had just taken twenty-five G's off of a
broken-hearted girl who was chasing the ghost of her accidentally
drowned father. Gee, I thought, what a wonderful vocation I've
found for my life's work.

"Ah, with my luck, the check will probably
bounce anyway," I said aloud to the empty room.

But it didn't.

2

WORCESTER IS THE RODNEY
DANGERFIELD
of American cities. It is the
second largest city in New England, but until recently the commuter
trains didn't stop here. Even now, with only three trains to Boston
each morning, and three back each evening, the schedule seems
um...reluctant. The population is more than 160,000, but candidates
for statewide office rarely campaign here. The businesses downtown
fold in an absurd rotation inspired by erratic and seemingly
meaningless regulation. There is a shopping mall downtown, but it
has gone through several cycles of prosperity and despair. When it
was built, the brain trust that conceived it, surrounded it with a
massive indoor parking garage. All manner of human depravity has
manifest itself inside these walls down through the years. Women
shoppers from the surrounding suburbs - the very lifeblood of any
mall's economic success - are just simply afraid to go in there,
and people that live within walking distance of it can't afford
anything sold there. So it cycles down until it becomes an
embarrassing gang controlled vipers den, and the city sends in the
cops and pumps in the taxpayer dollars to spruce it up for another
run.

The AUD, once a proud center for the
performing arts, had fallen into such a pathetic state of
disrepair, that the company contracted by the city to manage it,
couldn't book an act of any kind that would play it, so it folded.
Its collapse sparked a year of political combat. Elected officials
got their friends appointed to high paying jobs and studies were
commissioned to determine the next best use of the property. A
mountain of taxpayer money was spent and in the end, the building
was left two thirds vacant and the Juvenile Court, which had been
located in another crumbling city building, was moved in to the
remaining third. It is now an irregular maze of offices and
courtrooms populated by rats and stone-faced employees that can
turn even the simplest of tasks into impossible
problems.

The Superior and District Courts of Worcester,
where I ply my trade, offer, perhaps, the best evidence of
Worcester's status in the Commonwealth. The Main Street Courthouse
is the busiest court building in Massachusetts, bar none. It is
packed to the rafters with criminal and civil litigants day in and
day out. The hallways are clogged with lawyers squeezed into
corners, working out deals with one another. Criminals, the tall
and the small, are hauled in from the jail each day and caged like
cobra and mongoose in pathetically tiny cells off the main
courtrooms. They howl obscenities at the top of their lungs and
grope through the bars at the ass of any Lawyerette foolish enough
to venture down one of the narrow corridors between the cells. They
pound each other senseless over trivial slights and often appear
before the court in shackles and only semi-conscious. If out on
bail, they wait in the same packed corridors as their victims,
trying to cajole or intimidate them into recanting their testimony.
Judges, robed in judicial splendor, preside in makeshift courtrooms
no larger than the jail cells, and find themselves in uncomfortably
close proximity to the accused when announcing their verdicts. The
cafeteria and the boiler room share space in the basement and smell
the same. The clerk's office is a long, narrow, open room full of
desks behind a counter packed with confused citizens who are, for
the most part, ignored. The District Attorney’s office is a rabbit
warren of green metal desks and cubicles. Police Officers from
every surrounding town wait in cramped quarters to be interviewed
by an Assistant DA about testimony they'd be giving in court.
Magistrates hold hearings in cramped offices that make a mockery of
the process.

Every year the state budget contains money to
build a new courthouse. One year the Governor refused to authorize
the funds because the share of the work that would go to the unions
was too large. On another occasion the funds lapsed because the
local politicians couldn't decide where to put the new courthouse,
or how to allocate the credit for it among themselves. There is no
end to the excuses as to why it hasn't been built and no limit to
the number of elected officials who will jam themselves in front of
microphones to blame someone else.

There is money in the budget again this
year.

*****

EVERYONE IN THE SYSTEM
is always frazzled to the edge of their sanity.
You cannot ask for directions to the men's room without eliciting
an icy scowl. Lawyers need things: a motion or hearing date; copies
of fat files; case law, and are therefore widely despised by the
courthouse staff. In my practice I am what is known as a Bar
Advocate or Court Appointed Lawyer.. I am sent forth by an
organization known as CPCS, the Committee for Public Counsel
Services, to protect the rights of the indigent. There is no lower
form of life in the legal pecking order than I. Sometimes lawyers
of my ilk are called Public Defenders, however nothing we do in the
Bar Advocate role could be considered public defense. In fact it is
quite the opposite. It is my job to get criminals back out on the
street. I keep the streetwalkers walking, the dope peddlers
peddling and the wife beaters beating a path back to their old
lady's door. Criminals, you see, the Supreme Court has decided, are
entitled to a free lawyer who must be a zealous advocate in their
defense (Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), for those of
you keeping score at home). The purpose of this is to ensure that
the innocent are not snared in a net cast too wide by the police.
And that's an excellent idea, because there are some unsavory
characters out there walking around with badges. But I'll let you
in on a little secret .... my client?... he did it...most of the
time anyway. Not that you could get even those caught on film to
admit their guilt.

The Bar Advocate's job is really one of sales
and negotiation. I have to sell an overworked, underpaid Assistant
District Attorney on a deal that will allow my client to plead and
walk. Why should he do that? Because if he insists on jail time,
I'm going to put his tired, overworked ass through a jury trial,
the outcome of which will be uncertain. In fact, the only thing
certain about a jury trial is that the ADA will have to work like a
dog to meet his burden of proof - that timeless classic: Beyond a
Reasonable Doubt! And I, in the zealous advocacy of my client, will
object to every piece of evidence he tries to introduce as hearsay,
or prejudicial, or irrelevant to the matter at hand.

Since its very inception, this concept of
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt has defied every attempt at
quantification. Really what it is beyond, is the juror's ability to
comprehend. It is often times beyond the Judge's ability to
explain. Any defense attorney worth his salt will dump it in the
Judge's lap during closing arguments. The Judge will have little
chance of explaining it in a way that will help the jury, and he
might mangle it enough to create grounds for appeal, if the
defendant is convicted. I usually try something like this: "Ladies
and Gentleman of the Jury, we thankfully live in a society where
the police can't just grab us off the street and put us in jail on
their suspicions about the area that they find us in, or their
predisposition about our race, or the fact that we dress unusually.
No, they must have more! They have to have proof, and not just any
kind of proof, because liberty hangs in the balance, they have to
have proof' (here it comes) Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The
Government has to carry that burden, not my client, and as the
judge will tell you when he explains it to you, it is a heavy
burden indeed." I have learned not to look at the Judge when
delivering this little soliloquy.

So for the most part we haggle out a deal. A
little probation here, a little suspended sentence there, maybe a
continuance without a finding for a first time offense or a guilty
with a sentence of time served if the defendant has been sitting in
the can since arraignment. In the end the defendant strolls out of
the courthouse with his record beefed up, the ADA closes another
case and I send a small bill off to the Commonwealth for my
services.

But sometimes you have to go to trial.
Sometimes your client just has no redeeming graces. He's guilty,
has a long history of the same kind of offense, the Commonwealth
has hard evidence against him and witnesses willing to testify.
This usually means that the DA's offer is going to be the maximum
penalty allowed under the law for the offense charged. My client at
this point has nothing to lose and everything to gain by going to
trial, and so that is what you do. Sometimes you even win one and
the defendant walks and tells every criminal he knows that his
lawyer got him off. I'm never sure if that is good or bad
publicity.