Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer Page B

at the home of another friend, Kira Lintner, and Kira’s boyfriend and their mutual friend Chris Wheatley had been with them, too. Manganaro said they had spent the evening drinking some beer and watching three horror movies; he remembered one, Friday the 13th , but he couldn’t remember others. He and Kira had left about midnight, to go out and buy a Garfield mug. Dennis and Chris had remained behind.
    That was right, Dennis admitted. He had been so upset about Joyce that he’d gotten things mixed up. Actually Frank was right. What he said was exactly what they had done. The one thing he wasn’t certain about, he said, was the chronology. He was sure he’d left Kira’s about eleven-thirty and had gone straight home to bed because he had to be up early to be at work at seven in the morning.
    It was early evening before the police finished with him. By then Dennis Coleman knew he had become the prime suspect in the murder of Joyce Aparo. Indeed, the cops had asked him directly if he had killed her. He had denied it, but he was sure they didn’t believe him. He was badly shaken, and it showed in his face when he walked through the door. His father took one look at him and asked, “Dennis, do you need legal help?”
    â€œYes.”
    Dennis Coleman, Sr., asked his son just one more question. “Did you do it?”
    Dennis Coleman, Jr., nodded his head yes.
    His father turned and went to the phone.
    The lawyer Dennis Coleman, Sr., called that night was Maurice Hatcher Norris. In his late thirties, balding, of medium height, Reese Norris is a man with a zest for battle, with a dramatic courtroom style, a man who has realized his childhood dream. “I always wanted to be not just a lawyer,” he says, “but a courtroom lawyer, and a criminal lawyer at that.” That was what he had become.
    This was a dream he worked hard to achieve. A native of New Jersey, graduate of Rutgers, he had gone on to the University of Connecticut Law School. As a student he went to work as an intern in the federal public defender’s office, for free when it turned out that the public defender had no funds for interns. By the time he was graduated, Norris had handled briefs and assisted on enough cases to begin creating a reputation. At that point he turned to the other side and became an assistant United States attorney in Connecticut, a job he held until, in 1978, he struck out on his own. In the years since, he has become one of the most successful, and expensive, criminal lawyers in southern New England, a lawyer who has lost only about a half dozen of the hundred or more cases he has handled that have gone to trial, many of his victories coming in cases that seemed at first unwinnable. The result has been that he is able to afford the expensive custom-made Porsche sports car he loves, whose license plate reads “NT-GLTY,” and other cars, the large sprawling house on several acres in Glastonbury where he lives with his wife and two children and the good clothes he wears, just about all he wants.
    Norris met with Dennis for the first time the following morning. It is not, of course, a defense attorney’s job to do the police’s work for them or to see that legal justice is served. It doesn’t matter whether the client is guilty or innocent, for under the law every person has the right to the best counsel he or she can get. The attorney’s job is to defend the client as best as he or she can. Norris listened to his new client, who told the lawyer he had done the deed but told him little else, identified no one else as having been involved in any way.
    While they were sitting at the Colemans’ dining-room table during this initial conference, the telephone rang. It was for Dennis. He took it, listened, said into the phone, “Mr. Norris is here with me now.” When he returned to the table, he told Norris that the caller had been his girl friend, Karin Aparo. She