Fugitive

“Or try to. I made it clear that Charlie is my client, not she. And I hope you know I can handle the Martha Brices of this world.”

“That I do, but it won’t be easy, and you’ve never been involved in a media circus like the one you’re about to encounter. It can be intoxicating. How many world-class lawyers have you seen turn into fools as soon as they were given a chance to pontificate on national television?”

“Point taken, but you forget that I’ll have a wise old mentor to guide me while I’m on my journey along the yellow brick road. I’m sure I can count on you to pour a bucket of cold water on me if I start acting like a jackass.”

Frank smiled. He’d have the bucket ready, but-knowing his daughter as he did-he doubted he’d ever have to use it.

“I have two requests, Dad,” Amanda said. “Can you fill me in on the Pope case? I read the papers and saw some of it while you were trying it, and we talked a little, but that was twelve years ago and I could do with a refresher course.”

“You want me to do that now?”

“Give it a shot.”

“I don’t know if I can, off the top of my head. Look, I do have to finish this memo. So why don’t we order in and talk in the conference room at lunch? I’ll have the file brought up from storage. That will give me time to think.”

“Fair enough.”

“You said you had two requests. What the second?”

“It dawned on me that we might have a conflict problem. I haven’t talked to the bar yet, but I’ll be representing a codefendant of someone you represented. She can’t be charged again, but I can still imagine problems. So, I wondered if you would get Sally Pope to sign a waiver.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Frank said, his face displaying none of the emotions that the thought of seeing Sally Pope evoked.

Frank and Amanda talked for a while more. Then Frank told her that he needed to get back to his memo and she went to her office. Frank did have to finish the memo but he really wanted time alone to deal with the possibility that he would have to see Sally Pope again. She’d been out of his life for a long time but there were still scars.

Frank leaned back in his chair and stared out of his window at the green hills that towered over downtown Portland. The sky was clear and blue and dotted with white clouds; a tranquil scene that was at odds with the emotions boiling up inside him. Thinking about Sally Pope was painful, so Frank turned his attention to Charlie Marsh. Frank’s client may have been Sally Pope but the trial had always been about Marsh, and Charlie’s story began with the prison standoff.

PART II. State of Oregon v. Sally Pope 1996-1997

CHAPTER 10

Minutes before Crazy Freddy Clayton started his hare-brained attempt to escape from the state prison, he and Charlie Marsh were working on a writ of habeas corpus at a table in the rickety wooden stacks that held the prison library’s woefully inadequate collection of legal texts. The cellmates were best friends and a truly odd couple. They were dressed in identical prison Levi’s and blue work shirts, and they were both a shade under six feet but that was where the similarities ended.

Charlie had blond hair and no tattoos. Freddy had shaved his head and resembled an art gallery when naked. Charlie was looking at parole in a few weeks on a three-year sentence for credit card fraud. Crazy Freddy was serving consecutive twenty-year terms for attempted murder and armed robbery and would be using a walker by the time he left the prison. Charlie had pumped a little iron since begi

While Freddy lived for violence, Charlie was a pacifist for practical reasons; he was a coward who had lost almost every fight in which he’d been involved. In fact, if it weren’t for Freddy, Charlie would have been one of the most picked-on boys in school and someone’s bitch in the prison. But Freddy had grown up next door to Charlie and they’d been best friends since elementary school. Charlie hid Freddy in his house whenever Clayton’s drunken father went on a rampage, and he’d helped Freddy-who was not too bright-with his schoolwork from day one. Freddy reciprocated by beating the crap out of anyone who dared to pick on his friend. It was amazing, but Freddy-a true paranoid-trusted Charlie. When he found out Charlie was headed for his lockup, he’d made certain that the inmates knew that his pal was off-limits and he had arranged to bunk with him.

Like most sociopaths, Freddy was convinced that he was highly intelligent and he was constantly coming up with “brilliant” ideas for overturning his convictions. These were the kind of ideas that never held up under close scrutiny, but Freddy rarely had his ideas scrutinized, because no one had the courage to argue with him. Debate was useless anyway, since Freddy would pound his critic into pulp when Freddy grew frustrated over his inability to understand the critic’s logic. Charlie never suggested directly that his friend’s ideas were stupid. Freddy had never touched him in anger during all the years they’d been pals, but it was always better to play it safe where Freddy was concerned.

“I’m not finding anything,” Charlie said. He’d been reading cases in which the courts overturned convictions because of incompetence of counsel.

“Look harder. There’s gotta be something about it in them books.”

“I don’t know, Freddy,” Charlie said cautiously. “I just don’t see the Supreme Court overturning your conviction because the guy peed a lot.”

“Listen, man, you ever have to go real bad?”

“Sure.”

“How well are you thinking when you got to go real bad?”

“It is distracting.”

“That’s my point. The motherfucker was peeing at every recess, and those court sessions were long. How the fuck is he go

“Well, yes, it would be like falling asleep. There are cases where the courts have held that a defendant didn’t receive an adequate defense when his lawyer fell asleep during the trial.”

“See, now you’re thinking.”

“An incontinence defense would certainly be revolutionary.”

“A what?”

“Incontinence. It means the guy can’t hold it in, he wets himself. This might lead the Supreme Court to order all lawyers to wear Depends.”

Freddy smiled. “I like that.”

It was at this moment that warden Jeffrey Pulliams entered the library with prison guard Larry Merritt and three librarians from the county library system-Mabel Brooks, Ariel Pierce, and Jackie Schwartz. Warden Pulliams was a chubby, balding optimist who believed in rehabilitation. During his tenure, he had striven to build ties between the prison and the community to aid the transition of ex-convicts from incarceration to a productive life in society. This tour was part of the warden’s outreach program. It was his hope that the librarians would not only send books to the prison, but would also help promote the literacy and creative writing courses he had introduced into the prison curriculum.

Freddy Clayton was well known to the warden. They’d had a heart-to-heart talk each time the inmate had been released from solitary. The warden believed in the basic goodness of man and he never gave up on one of his charges. He was very pleased to find Freddy in a library. Of course, Crazy Freddy was not interested in outreach or broadening his mind. His main interest in life was getting out of prison in any way possible. He believed that the fortuitous appearance of the three lady librarians presented him with a faster way of achieving this goal than pursuing a writ of habeas corpus through the courts.