Killing Time by Thomas Berger

Author:Thomas Berger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781480468481
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1967-10-29T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

MELROSE did not like to defend madmen. Otherwise he had few prejudices as to clients. He had represented so many professional killers that his enemies had success in labeling him as a gangsters’ counsel, with the implication that he was therefore himself a criminal. This reputation proved of great value, bringing him not only more business from the mobs, but also from little helpless people who had got into trouble: and if condemned for taking an enormous fee from the employers of one Joe Guglielmo, accused of murdering one Vito Marino with a sawed-off shotgun and sinking the corpse, weighted with a cargo of cast-iron objects, into a body of water, Melrose could always point to his subsequent defense of some penniless Negro charged with breaking his wife’s neck in a family quarrel.

Melrose could have done so if he wished, but as it happened he never defended himself: he had too much contempt for others. In return, except by the disreputable elements, he was universally feared and detested, for his associations, for his arrogance, but mostly for his habitual courtroom victories. He had served as defense counsel in eighty-two capital cases and had never yet lost a client to the executioner.

As to the moral guilt of his clients, Melrose had no interest whatever. If they confessed to him, as they sometimes did, his immediate and only concern was as to whether they had also done so to anyone available to the prosecution. Not that he was discouraged even though the district attorney possessed a detailed statement admitting all and signed by the creature Melrose must defend, along with eight eyeball witnesses. Melrose preferred hopeless cases and preposterously unfavorable odds. He loathed criminals and, as a man who lived by his wits, despised violence. Had he been a police officer, no lawbreaker would have received his mercy. As a judge he would have been implacable—and furthermore would never have tolerated a Melrose in his court.

But as it stood he was neither more nor less than an attorney at law, and his opponents must encounter him on that ground or void the field. In any trial that which was tried was the prosecution’s case. According to the great and fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, the accuser bore the burden of proof. Not even the massive power of the state could penetrate this armor into which Melrose had buckled himself at the beginning of his career and in which he expected to be buried, like Frederick the Great in his impregnable Prussian uniform. Therefore Melrose could afford to be otherwise disaffected from his fellows. He had no political ambitions, no social or ethnic identifications, and secretly, and contrary to the charges of his enemies, he was essentially modest. His opinion of himself was not so high as his assessment of others was low. He existed in a time and place in which, it seemed to him, only relative judgments were feasible: he perhaps came off better than most because he was almost

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