“Mr. Duffie?”
Wayne Duffie, the county clerk in charge of the elections division, among other things, stands so quickly that he wobbles a bit on his feet. In his fifties, he is as short as he is round, and has paired his brown slacks with a green sports coat, double-breasted, with gold-tone buttons, the uniform of a man content with the least amount of political power available to him, elected to count the votes that put other people into offices over his head. On his right ring finger, he wears a class ring, the metal cutting into the meat all around it. Jay can smell his cologne from here. “I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss here, Your Honor,” Duffie says. “This is unprecedented. I, uh, if I could, Your Honor, would like to elect Mr. Nichols to speak for the county, as it’s his office with which the complainant seems to have the problem.” He gestures toward Matt Nichols, who stands.
“If I may, Your Honor.”
“Go on.”
“Judge, this is just a stunt, of the highest order, and a waste of the court’s time. Mr. Porter’s client is charged with a homicide, indicted by a grand jury in this county. There is no evidence of some big conspiracy against Mr. Hathorne, or frankly that his legal troubles have anything to do with the election. Where Mr. Porter would like to suggest that our office is somehow using a murder charge to influence an election, from where I stand he appears to be using the timing of an election to get his client out of a capital murder charge.”
“That could not more greatly misstate my purpose here,” Jay says.
“Your Honor, his ‘purpose here’ is to create a diversion for his client. It’s a cheap stunt and a supreme show of disrespect to the people of this city.”
“Not when we’re talking about no less than the sanctity of the entire electoral process,” Jay says, standing, taking a gamble that Judge Little is not so close to retirement that he’s impervious to a good, old-fashioned argument about the power of a courtroom, the plain facts of why they’re all here, why, two hundred years on, men and women like Jay, Judge Little, Matt Nichols, and Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux even bother showing up. “My god, Judge, do you really think I would try something like this unless I thought that this is it, all I have? The court, Your Honor, this has always been the church of last resort, the place where we at least take a stab at doing the right thing, where we believe it’s even possible,” he says, pouring it on a little thick, sure, but only because he believes it. “All I’m asking is that my client get a fair trial, and Houston get a fair election.” Judge Little is quiet a moment, twirling his spectacles by one of the stems; tiny rectangles of glass, they are prisms playing tricks in the light, reflecting green one moment, a hard red the next. Behind him, Jay can hear the scratch of graphite on paper, reporters and a few of the spectators taking notes.
Finally, Judge Little speaks. “Do you have anything more than the girl working for Wolcott?”
“Do I need more?”
“Do you have proof, Counselor?” The judge lifts the stapled pages on his desk. “I’ve got the affidavits here from Pleasantville residents, the ones who saw the victim handing out these anti-Hathorne flyers, but where is the hard line between the flyers and Wolcott’s campaign? In theory, anybody could have printed up these deals,” he says, holding up one of the Buffalo Bayou development flyers, “anybody wanting to tip the scales in Wolcott’s favor.”
“My office is working on that right now,” Jay says.
He has both Rolly and Lon out in the streets, working every print shop from Galveston to Humble, north of the airport, trying to locate the one commissioned to design and print hundreds of flyers linking Hathorne to a bayou development project. “One of the problems with moving forward with an election on the current timetable is the possibility of never having the ‘hard’ answers. What happens if this trial is held in six months, or a year from now, and not only is my client acquitted, but it’s been proved that there was outright conspiracy on the part of the D.A., and she’s already sitting up in city hall?”
Judge Little sighs, looking from Jay to Nichols.
“He does have a point,” he says.
Jay wedges himself into this slim opening.
“Absent some action on the court’s part,” he says, “this murder case will hang over the whole election. It will taint the whole process.”
“It does stink,” the judge says. “A sitting D.A. running for office while prosecuting a member of the other candidate’s family, his campaign manager, no less? I can’t even imagine why she would, in the middle of the runoff campaign, leave herself open to something this messy unless she stood to gain.”
“We have an eyewitness, Your Honor,” Nichols says, very nearly losing his cool. He’s a state prosecutor used to criminal court judges bending over backward to see his every argument as just good old common sense. That they are even still talking about this appears to have stumped the young lawyer.
“You have an eyewitness who saw my client,” Jay says, “or an eyewitness who saw someone ‘matching his description’?” Which is the catchall phrase of lazy prosecutors everywhere.
Nichols makes a play for the judge’s equanimity, his levelheadedness in the face of the absurd. “What exactly is Mr. Porter asking the court to do, postpone a citywide election indefinitely?” he says.
“No, just until my client gets a trial.”
“Which is the same thing as putting it off indefinitely.”
Jay taps the counsel table with his fingertips. “My client is prepared to invoke his right to a speedy trial. We’re ready to go at any time, Your Honor.”
The judge raises an eyebrow, throwing this over to Nichols.