Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 by Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

arrested me.”
    “When was that?”
    “After they took me downtown. Before they started questioning me.”
    “Had they informed you of your rights by then?”
    “Yes. I think so.”
    “Had they informed you of your right to a lawyer?”
    “Yes. I didn’t think I’d need one. It was all too ridiculous. I thought I’d be out of there in a minute. I don’t even own
     a gun. That wasn’t my gun. I was on the boat for no more than…”
    “You were on the
boat
?”
    “Yes.”
    “Last
night
?”
    “Yes. But only for a little while.”
    “How short a while?”
    “Half an hour? No more than that. I didn’t kill Brett, I didn’t even know he was
dead
until they came to my house and arrested me. Matthew, I want someone I know and trust to defend me, I want
you,
Matthew. Please help me. I didn’t murder Brett Toland.”
    I looked at her again. Behind the glasses, her right eye had begun wandering yet another time. I wondered how often that wayward
     eye had served to enlist sympathy and compassion.
    “If I represent you…” I said.
    “Yes. Please. Help me, Matthew.”
    “…I’d want someone else in my office to do the actual trial work.”
    “However you want to do it.”
    I nodded.
    “Tell me again,” I said. “Did you kill him?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    I nodded again.
    “Your first appearance hearing is at eleven this morning,” I said, and looked at my watch. “We’ve got an hour to talk. Tell
     me what you were doing on that boat.”
    I have to tell you that I frankly believed she was making a mistake. I am very good at gathering facts, I will admit that,
     I am a total bulldog when it comes to sniffing things out and clamping my jaws on them and shaking them till they yelp. But
     I really don’t think I have the requisite shark mentality to try a murder case. I’m not being modest. I just don’t think I’m
     cut out for it. Benny Weiss, admittedly the best criminal lawyer in all Calusa—in fact, maybe in all Florida—once told me
     that he never asks a person charged with murder whether he committed the crime.
    “I don’t
care
if a client did it or not,” he told me. “I’m only interested in combating the charge against him. So I tell him what the
     other side has, or what they think they have, and then between us we work out a plan of attack. You’ll notice I did not use
     the word
defense,
Matthew. As far as I’m concerned, this is an
attack,
a relentless
attack
against forces determined to deprive my client of his constitutional right to liberty, whether he committed the crime or
     not.”
    Well, the way I see it, the Canons of Professional Ethics notwithstanding, which canons grant to a lawyer the right—but not
     the obligation—to undertake a defense
regardless
of his personal opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused, otherwise an
innocent
person might God forbid be denied a proper defense and our entire judicial system would go down the drain, provided the jury
     system doesn’t flush it out to sea first…
    But the way
I
see it, if someone has committed murder—or arson, or armed robbery, or rape, or aggravated assault, or any one of the hundreds
     of crimes we have designated as affronts to civilization—then he should be punished for that crime. It’s a bromide of the
     criminal justice system that you’ll never find anyone in prison who’s actually committed the crime that put him there. You
     won’t find any guilty people in a courtroom, either. That’s because a lawyer got there first. The day I stand in a courtroom
     and hear a judge ask, “How do you plead?” and hear the accused answer, “Guilty, Your Honor” is the day I will fall down dead
     in another coma.
    Meanwhile, I bequeath to every criminal lawyer in the world anyone who has stabbed his wife or shot his mother or set fire
     to his girlfriend’s house or poisoned his goldfish or peed in his neighbor’s mailbox.
    Me, I won’t defend anyone I think is guilty.
    Warren’s