Free Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver Page B

to go to prison I want to get on with it.”
    â€œHm,” I said thoughtfully. I felt curiously chastened and deflated. Here was a client, I saw, who possessed a pretty good lecture style of his own. I found myself fretfully hoping that I was at least the second choice. The thought gnawed at me. “I hope I was the second choice?” I said.
    â€œYou were,” the Lieutenant replied quietly. “By the way, what’s this ‘cop out’ mean?”
    The Lieutenant had not only delivered a swift little lecture of his own; he’d also adroitly got me back on my own.
    â€œLieutenant, I’m charmed,” I said, carrying on. “Just as bugout means retreat, so cop out means pretty much the same thing: to plead guilty, toss in the sponge, grab at a straw, confess to the cops, or—as the old English judges so quaintly put it—throw oneself upon the country.”
    It was rather a big mouthful and the Lieutenant thoughtfully chewed on it. “Hm … . You mean you simply don’t want to take a chance on the ‘unwritten law’?”
    I stared up at the ceiling, pursing my lips. “You can put it that way if you want. Yes, that’s fair enough. I’m a lawyer, not a juggler or a hypnotist nor even a magician or boy orator. When I undertake to defend a man before a jury I want to have a fighting legal chance to acquit him. That includes having a decent chance to move for a new trial or successfully appeal. Maybe you were morally entitled to plug Barney Quill. I’ll even concede it. But in court I prefer to leave
the moral judgments to the angels. I doubtless possess my fair share of ham, like most lawyers, but I do not want to go into court and depend simply upon the charity or stupidity or state of the liver of twelve jurors.” I paused. With old Crocker now safely out of the picture I could perhaps afford to bear down even harder. “What’s more, I don’t intend to,” I said. “Have I made myself clear?”
    â€œI’m afraid you have, Counselor.”
    â€œAnd, since you still seem to hug the ‘unwritten law,’ there’s one more thing. There’s the important matter of saving face. We complacent palefaces of the West like to think that this business of saving face is a sin, a sort of half-juvenile and half-inscrutable mystique confined solely to the Orient” I paused. “That’s a lot of —a lot of unmitigated—”
    â€œHorseshit,” Lieutenant Manion said, as solemn as an owl.
    â€œPrecisely,” I said. “Spoken like a true soldier and a gentleman, Lieutenant. And thanks. But getting back to face … . All of us, everywhere, all of the time, spend our waking hours saving face. This case itself is riddled with face. After all, one of the mute unspoken reasons you are being prosecuted is to save face, community face. The biggest reason I hesitate to take your case, as things now stand, is my fear of losing it. That is merely a negative form of advance face-saving. Face, face, face. Everybody has to save face, and, whether they have to or not, everyone tries to; it’s one of the basic compulsions of men.” I paused. “Are you following me?”
    â€œYes. It’s most interesting,” he answered gravely. I glanced at him keenly. It was rather hard at times, I saw, to tell when this character was being sarcastic.
    â€œThanks,” I said. “That brings me to my sixty-four-dollar point. Even jurors have to save face. Get this now. The jury in your case might simply be dying to let you go on your own story, or because they have fallen for your wife, or have learned to hate Barney Quill’s guts, or all of these things and more. But if the judge—who’s got nice big legal face to save, too—must under the law virtually tell the jurors to convict you, as I think he must now surely do, then the only way they can possibly let you go is by flying