Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (20 page)

“If you feel that way, why are you doing it?”

“Somebody
has to plead the prince’s case,” Mickey said. “Isn’t that what our system of justice is all about?”

Dennis scratched at his beard, which he realized needed trimming yet again. “After practicing law for twenty years,” he said, “I still don’t know what the hell it’s about. I know what it pretends to be about. But what it achieves might be something else.”

Mickey sighed. “And what can I do for you this morning, oh great hairy one?”

“I need help,” Dennis said. “Someone to sit second chair.”

Back in New York, Dennis had begun his career as a neophyte assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. He was one of more than two hundred criminal lawyers working in an office with virtually unlimited FBI and ATF investigators at their service. Later, in private practice, he declined to become a member of a law firm, but he shared with some like-minded mavericks a midtown suite of offices and, more important, the pooled services of legal secretaries, paralegals, and young law clerks. It was only on TV that lawyers worked as lone gunfighters. In the real world of trial, a lawyer needed help—needed not only additional brainpower and shoe leather, but ears to listen, minds to criticize, and sometimes arms to restrain.

“I’m not a criminal defense attorney,” Mickey said.

“You’ve litigated plenty of civil cases. I need to talk to somebody, that’s the real point. It takes common sense, Mickey, and you’ve got plenty of that. I’m beginning to think I’ve lost mine. Right now I need help to pick a jury.”

“When exactly do you go to trial?”

“April tenth. Three weeks.”

“I’ve never asked, and neither has our partner, Bill—but who’s paying for all this?”

“My mother-in-law doesn’t think in those terms. But when the trial’s over, the family, and that includes me, will cough up for my billable hours. Yours too. I’m not asking you for a free ride.”

“Well”—Mickey sighed—”family is family … and if you let them, they’ll bleed you dry. I once defended Bill’s kid on a DUI and the kid didn’t even offer me a drink. This thing you’re hooked into is a little more complicated. But we’ll work something out. I won’t charge you more than double the usual fee. Meanwhile, let’s go to lunch and you can tell me what I don’t know about the case.”

“More to the point,” Dennis said, “I’ll tell you what
I
don’t know about the case. And it will be a long lunch.”

He had never been to trial in Judge Florian’s court. In all his Pitkin County misdemeanor cases so far, he had pled them out, made some sort of deal with the young assistant DAs who were his opponents.

The morning after his meeting with Mickey, he stopped by the courthouse to inspect the court calendar for the month. He noted three cases slated for trial the following week: two for burglary, one for assault. Dennis asked the court clerk if Ray Bond was coming up from Glenwood Springs to prosecute in any of the cases.

“He’ll probably do the assault case. He likes those.”

On the appointed day, Dennis entered the courtroom at a few minutes past 10 A.M. He took a seat to the rear.

The courtroom was empty but for a few dark-skinned relatives and friends of the defendant, a Salvadoran road worker named Hernandez who was accused of using a five-inch blade to slash the arm of the bartender of the Heavy Metal Café on the Cooper Street Mall. The bartender was his brother-in-law.

Dennis sat through what remained of jury selection. He listened and made notes. Ray Bond raced through a five-minute opening statement and then presented witnesses. He led them to say precisely what he wanted them to say.

“Are you trying to tell us, sir, that you saw the defendant grow suddenly angry at something the victim said? Is that what happened?”

A double-barreled leading question, but no one seemed to care. The young defense counsel from Carbondale raised only one meek objection all morning, and that was summarily overruled.

Dennis got the point. In Judge Florian’s courtroom, if you represented the state of Colorado, you could do just about as you pleased. It would be bad form for the defense to object, and certainly impolitic. A local defense attorney had to live with the judge and prosecutor in the months and years to follow. Times might come when it would be important to cut a deal on behalf of a client. Why make enemies of neighbors and coworkers? Justice would even itself out in the long haul.

Ray Bond moved forward like an engineer at the wheel of a train: it was on track, it would not veer; it might rattle, but it would hardly sway. At about eleven-thirty the defense attorney leaned over to whisper words of reality in his client’s ear. Hernandez’s shoulders sagged under his thin shirt. Slowly, he nodded.

The defense attorney asked to approach the bench. Within minutes a bargain had been struck, a plea of guilty entered, and the jury dismissed. Sentencing was scheduled for a month down the road.

Dennis left the courtroom, drove out Cemetery Lane, parked his car, and began to walk down the bed of the old Rio Grande Railroad line along the Roaring Fork River. Trudging through the fresh snow, he listened to the murmur of the river. Bright sun glittered off the whitecaps. After a while he sat on a boulder by the river’s edge.

He was trying to connect the dots.

My client is guilty, and she’s lied to me. She and Scott murdered Henry and Susan Lovell. But I still have to fight to prove they’re innocent.

Chapter 17
Dental Amalgam

A SCRAWLED MESSAGE from Lila awaited him when he got back to the office. It said: “Dennis, sheriff asks: Can you be at his office a few minutes after five o’clock?”

He called and was patched through to Josh Gamble on a cellular telephone in Redstone, the farthest outpost of Pitkin County. The sheriff was there to let people know he was vigilant and thinking of their good and welfare.

“What’s up, Josh?”

“Some discovery we’re going to share,” the sheriff said.

Dennis was silent a moment. “Give me a hint. Am I going to discover something that will make me happy or something that will make me weep?”

“Something that’s given me a headache that would kill lesser men. What I’m saying is we don’t know what the hell to do about this bit of information. Maybe you’ll be able to tell us. Be there after five, okay?”

Dennis looked out the window later and saw bloated gray clouds overhanging the town. In just a few minutes they turned a gauzy white. You could no longer see Aspen Mountain. Skiers up there would be caught in a whiteout. You could ski out of it and hope that a tree didn’t get in your way, or you could sit still and hope that you weren’t in the way of someone trying to ski out of it.

At ten past five, with the wind whipping and the snow biting his cheeks, Dennis walked into the courthouse. He shook the white mantle from his shoulders and stomped down the steps to the sheriff’s basement office.

Ray Bond was there, kicking the snow off his boots. “Big one coming in,” he said.

Dennis nodded politely. Josh Gamble waved him to a chair.

Jeff Waters sat on the couch next to Otto Beckmann, the balding, middle-aged pathologist from Glenwood Springs. Queenie O’Hare bounded through the door a moment later, cheeks red and wet.

“Just go ahead and soak my carpet,” the sheriff barked. “It’s only county property. And never mind that this is your boss’s office. Your heartthrob called. His last patient canceled out because of the storm—he’s on his way here. Prepare yourself, O’Hare. Don’t just leap at him and wrassle him to the floor and rip off his clothes and take down his long johns. Well, all right, do it. But let him tell his story first.”

“Oh, shut up,” Queenie said to the sheriff.

Less than a minute later Howard Keating, D.D.S., bulked through the door, looking like an L.L. Bean-clothed version of the abominable snowman. He was a larger man than Josh Gamble, as cheerful and ebullient. In his youth he had played offensive tackle for the USC Trojans, failed to make the first cut with the Dallas Cowboys, and become a lifeguard in Santa Monica, where he partied nonstop until the age of thirty; and then, brilliantly, managed admission to UCLA dental school.

“I’m a prime example,” he liked to say to his patients, “of why you don’t have to worry about your children who you think are lost souls. I came off the beach and got to be the most expensive dentist in the most expensive ski resort in America.”

He was the county’s forensic odontologist. When the legal system needed an opinion furnished by dental science, Howard Keating was called upon. Dennis didn’t know him. Like everyone else in Springhill, if he needed a filling or a cleaning he went to Edward Brophy.

The sheriff reminded everybody that, the previous November, Howard had been called in by Dr. Beckmann to do a set of postmortem X-rays on the bodies unearthed at Pearl Pass. “The so-called Does—John and Jane.” The sheriff raised the corners of his mouth, mimicking a smile. The postmortem X-rays had been escorted by Queenie O’Hare to Dr. Brophy in Springhill, to be compared to the X-rays of Henry Lovell and Susan Lovell.

“And they didn’t match,” Josh Gamble said. “But that’s not what we’re here about, except maybe in a roundabout way.” He waved a large hand at the odontologist. “Howard, tell them.”

Keating, a handsome man, shifted his bulk in the easy chair in an effort to get comfortable. Queenie’s eyes never left his face.

“I have to go back to the day,” he said, “that I first took those X-rays, at Otto’s request. Those people were a long time dead and it was a little grisly. I took two semesters of gross anatomy at med school, so I’m used to the sight and the smells. What I do is flip a switch and tune out. Get the job done, go home to Jack Daniel’s.”

Everyone nodded.

“So when I was at the hospital,” Keating continued, “I didn’t really get my face down there and
study
the teeth in those corpses. But I thought about them later. I kind of conjured them up in my mind from to time, especially when I had older patients in the chair. Because something was odd. I knew it, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.”

Keating’s eyes shifted to Otto Beckmann. “I called Otto about ten days ago and asked him if he still had the corpses.”

Beckmann said, “We kept the bodies in the morgue down in Glenwood.” His basso voice had a strong Austrian accent; he had been born in the Tyrol and worked there as a ski instructor to finance his studies. “Embalmed, and of course still at forty-two degrees.”

For Dennis’s sake, the sheriff said, “They stay there until we sign a form saying they have no more forensic value. And that moment has not yet come.”

“I went down there to have a look,” Keating resumed. “I brought a couple of textbooks. I had previously told the medical examiner that I thought the male was in his late sixties, and the female a bit younger—and he agreed. You can tell age from the periodontal bone loss. I can also examine the restorations—fillings and crowns—and figure out approximately how old they are. I didn’t do that this past November. Didn’t want to get up close and personal for too long.”

He seemed to wait a moment for approval, and Josh Gamble gave it with a nod.

“This time I took a good long look at the restorations. If the male was sixty-eight, or even seventy, he’d have been born about 1925, right? And the woman would have been born around 1927. You usually get your first inlays in your teens. So when was that, for these victims?” Dennis said, “The mid-to-late 1930s.”

“Right. Any inlays done in that time frame,” Keating said, “would be gold or amalgam. Modern dental amalgam is a mixture of mercury with some other combination of metals.” He cleared his throat. “Am I boring you?”

“Not yet,” Dennis said.

“Hold tight. All these inlays are what we call cast inlays. They’re made by using the lost-wax process. The cast inlay was invented by a Chicago dentist in 1907—I looked up the date—and it’s been used ever since. Before that time, the best thing you could do with an accessible cavity was gold foil restoration. You rolled some gold leaf into cylinders and passed it over a spirit flame to weld it cold, and then, basically, you stuffed it into the tooth. It usually meant a few hours in the chair with a rubber dam over the mouth. Not fun.”

The sheriff grumbled, “You think it’s fun
now?”

Keating said, “Okay, here it comes. Both of these corpses had quite a few amalgam inlays in their mouths. But they also had gold foil restorations. Three in the male. Two in the female.”

Dennis made some calculations in his head. “That doesn’t seem possible. You told us that gold foil restoration wasn’t used after 1907, when cast inlays came in.”

“No,” Keating said, “the fact that the cast inlay was invented in 1907 didn’t mean that its use was immediately widespread. It took ten or fifteen years before it was standard practice.”

“That still brings us up to 1922 latest,” Dennis calculated. “At which time Mr. Doe and Mrs. Doe weren’t born yet.”

“Bingo,” Keating said.

Dennis spread his hands in a gesture of puzzlement. He was thinking about the gravestones in the village cemetery, trying to make a connection. None came readily.

“So you’re either wrong about their ages at the time of death,” he said, “or they went to a hillbilly dentist who never heard of cast inlays and the lost-wax process.”

Dr. Beckmann spoke emphatically. “We are not wrong about their ages. They were in their late sixties. The tongue may lie, but the prostate and the uterus, never.”

“Then we’re left with the hillbilly dentist,” Dennis said.

Keating shook his head. “Gold foil restorations were sophisticated work. They were not the work of hillbilly dentists. In the old mining camps of Colorado, they yanked the tooth. Or stuffed the hole with soft wood.”

Dennis frowned. “What else have you got?”

“With Otto’s approval, I pulled the amalgam inlays from the corpses’ mouths. I had them analyzed in my lab.”

Modern dental amalgam, Keating explained, was a mixture of mercury with other metals in an alloy—a mixture that had remained essentially unchanged since about 1910. It was 68 percent silver, with specific amounts of copper, tin, and zinc. Using this mixture, expansion and contraction could be precisely controlled.