Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea Page A

perverse expectation and masochistic glee dancing in his eyes. His arms were upraised in ministerial dignity, and his fingers were spread to signify the importance of what he was about to reveal. He paused for a long moment to heighten the suspense. The Right Reverend Gonzalez was about to testify before his congregation of peers. Surely he was about to relate the defense lawyer’s worst nightmare come true.
    “I, Matt Gonzalez, was doin’ a rape trial a couple of years ago in front of old Judge Garfield. Do you remember him?”
    “Yeah,” said a disapproving voice. “The old geezer with the inflatable doughnut pillow for his hemorrhoids and the stack of girlie magazines in the bottom drawer?”
    “Yeah, I remember him, too,” said Jesse with a scathing, sarcastic tone. “Did you know that his clerk had this electric switch hidden under her desk that she would flip on whenever an objection was being lodged?”
    One or two at the table knew of the secret switch. The rest had looks on their faces that spanned the full range of human emotion.
    “That switch activated a strong electric vibrator under His Honor’s seat that would shake him awake, and he would jerk bolt upright and shout at the top of his lungs, ‘The motion is denied with prejudice! The objection is overruled!’
    “The last time I tried a case in his court, one of the jurors had a heart attack right there in the jury box. God, it was something! It was pandemonium. The bailiffs were screaming into their walkie-talkies and running into each other. A nurse who had been on the jury panel was performing CPR right below the witness stand. The court clerk was pushing that switch so hard that it was lifting her desk clear off the floor, and the judge was rubbing the sand from his eyes and screaming, ‘Defense motion denied, defense motion denied!’ ”
    “That’s my man,” said Matt, with a wide grin. “Last time he read the Evidence Code, it was written in cuneiform. Come to think of it, I think his girlie magazines were Sumerian. Good-looking women, those Sumerians. They all have such beautiful eyes. Anyway, here I’m doin’ this rape trial and the victim is up on the stand. I’d just finished cross-examining her, and the prosecutor was up doing his paint-by-numbers redirect. Even after being prompted by the DA, the victim, bless her soul, had just admitted on cross that she could not really identify her assailant.”
    There was a gasp of disbelief at the table. Most victims simply identified as their assailant whoever was sitting next to counsel at the defense table. On several occasions victims have been known to choose the attorney as their attacker when the defendant happened to be dressed in a better suit than his lawyer’s. An honest victim is as rare as an honest defendant.
    “She had told my investigator the same thing months earlier. She had never seen her attacker’s face. She had real courage, that lady. Well, I didn’t really have any more questions for her beyond that. They had no fingerprints and no other eyewitnesses. After her identification fell apart, the prosecutor’s case was purely circumstantial and with no direct connection to my boy. A few hours after the crime was committed, my client was arrested down in the Tenderloin, near Leavenworth and Hyde Streets, with some of her credit cards in his possession. He had tried to use an automatic teller machine.”
    “He found them,” Newton intoned convincingly.
    “He bought them from the perpetrator,” said Chris Gauger, a new arrival at the table.
    “Exactly,” said Matt. “Even though I believed it was a thin, circumstantial case, I could still sense that the jury wanted to convict somebody. You know what I’m talking about.”
    Everyone knew what he was talking about.
    “Anyway, the poor woman felt so filthy and violated after the rape that she douched and showered almost immediately afterward. Of course there was no semen to test. They just couldn’t make my boy