The Luck of the Draw

Illustration by Dell Harris

It was one of those oppressively humid days where the air was still and the promise of relief from the thunderheads that loomed on the horizon was still an hour or more away. My clothes were sodden and my feet hurt from tramping all over the downtown area scattering cards. It was time for a rest and a cool drink in the quiet of my new office.

I paused to take a long look at the window before unlocking the door. The twenty-four carat gold-lettered sign had cost a small fortune, a fortune I didn’t yet have, and maybe never would acquire if events of the past week were any indication. A week—that’s how long the office of Rex Anwalt, Attorney-At-Law had been open for business.

Only—there hadn’t been any business. Beyond an occasional curious rubbernecker hardly anybody even looked at my storefront window, and those who did had obviously not been in need. I had taken brief encouragement when, on opening day, a strange little man had taken a notebook from his pocket and stopped to write something down, but except for me nobody had ever yet been inside—unless you counted the mailman, who had delivered the bill for telephone installation also on opening day.

For the first couple of days I had crouched behind the door between the reception area and my private office, peeking through the crack and counting the people who walked by, still hoping that something would happen. Before long, Uncle Joe’s prophetic words, the words he had uttered when I told him I meant to study law, began to echo through the stillness. “It’s dog eat dog these days. Not like when I started, when law was still an honorable profession, when lawyers didn’t have to steal to eat, and when a colleague’s word was good.”

If Uncle Joe hadn’t retired and moved away things might have been a lot easier for me. As it was, I didn’t have the cushy spot to move into that I’d been hoping for. I wouldn’t regard myself as a defeatist, but, considering how the first week had gone I was getting a little bit discouraged. That was why I’d spent the afternoon like I had, out beating the bushes to get noticed. After all, nothing was happening back at the office, and if somebody did call, the computer could schedule an appointment easily enough, all dates were open.

Suddenly, I noticed the red light flashing on the terminal. There had been a call; wouldn’t you know it, the minute you go out something like that happens. I fumbled in my pocket for the key, found it and jammed it into the lock, all the while cursing my luck. For days I’d sat around hoping this would happen.

Reason took over and I realized it was foolish to worry. After all, with my kind of luck it would be a wrong number anyhow, just as it had been the only other time the telephone had rung.

“Computer—play the message!”

There was a beep, followed by a pause, then that inevitable electronic buzzing. “Mr. Anwait, this is Daria Coons, Judge Westergren’s coordinator. I have an appointment for you. His name is Richard Thompson and he’s charged with murder. He’s in custody and you can see him at the jail. First chance you get I’d like you to stop in and sign an appearance. He’s already been arraigned.” The electronic noise stopped.

1 was stunned. I knew who Thompson was, of course, everybody did; he was the man who discovered the oil bush. He was worth millions, he could easily have afforded to hire the best in the business. So why was Judge Westergren appointing somebody like me to represent him in a murder case? It didn’t make sense, there had to be some kind of mistake.

I glanced at my watch. It was 3:00 P.M. The LED on the phone monitor was still lit, and showed the call had come in at 2:52 P.M. I’d just missed her. There was still plenty of time to hop over to the courthouse and sign the appearance, look at the official file and see Thompson before the sheriff cut off visiting to feed supper. I locked up again and hurried over there.

The courthouse was drafty as a barn, with the air conditioning on full blast. My wet clothes were beginning to feel uncomfortably clammy now, but I didn’t expect to be in there very long. Ms. Coons had Thompson’s file on her desk, anticipating I would want to see it. I signed the appearance for her and sat down in a chair in front of her desk to look through the file.

There wasn’t much in it. Thompson hadn’t yet been indicted, he had been arrested on a J.P. complaint and warrant. Bail had been denied. I went over the complaint carefully, looking for a mistake and finding nothing. Basically, all it said was that Thompson had intentionally or knowingly caused the death of Alejandro Gonzalez by shooting him with a gun, but that was legally sufficient to charge murder.

I knew the drill from there. Professor Tinker had pounded this into our heads for a whole semester. I could demand a hearing on probable cause, but I also knew that would be a waste of time because the D.A. could get him rearrested even if the magistrate turned him loose, simply by taking it back to the grand jury and getting him indicted. I knew the reason that hadn’t already happened was that Thompson had just been arrested day before yesterday and the D.A. simply hadn’t had time to schedule a grand jury meeting.

I left the file on the coordinator’s desk and went over to the jail, where they made me show my bar card. While I was fumbling around looking for it one of the regulars walked right past me without even being stopped. I wondered how it must feel to be that important.

Eventually they let me in and I rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. The door opened to reveal a guard inside a cage. He would be my next challenge. “I’m here to see Thompson,” I stuttered, hoping that might impress the guy.

Evidently it did; his jaw dropped and for an instant he was speechless. He recovered quickly and shoved a card to me through the bars. “Fill this out and sign it while I get him. You can wait in the visiting room.” He pointed to a closet-sized room across the hall.

I went in and waited, nervously rehearsing what 1 would say when I saw my very first client. I still hadn’t decided what would sound best when he came waddling out just ahead of the guard.

The orange coveralls and the rubber sandals were both an ill fit and Thompson didn’t look anything like the man whose picture I’d seen on the evening news the night before. That picture had obviously been from the T.V. station’s file and way out of date. This man was some five or six years older, and perhaps thirty pounds heavier.

I introduced myself and invited him to sit down on the other side of the tiny table.

“What’s all this foolishness, Mr. Anwalt? If I wanted a lawyer I’d hire one. I don’t need you, I’m guilty and that’s that.”

I cringed. “D-don’t say that, somebody’ll hear you.” I gawked around at the guard. I couldn’t tell whether he heard it or not, but I sure didn’t want him to hear any more, so I slammed the heavy steel door shut tight.

“What difference would that make? I already confessed.”

“Maybe we can get it suppressed, I…” I never finished the sentence. I couldn’t believe that anybody with Thompson’s credentials would do anything that stupid. He was supposed to be the dean of the molecular biologists, with an I.Q. some place up there in the stratosphere.

“You haven’t been paying attention, young man, I said I didn’t need you and I don’t. I know you probably mean well, and I admire your enthusiasm, but I’m a dead duck. I killed that skunk Gonzalez for the very good reason that he needed killing and I’m prepared to take my lumps for it. It’s as simple as that.”

I stiffened. Back in law school the professor had harped on that very point. A lawyer’s job is not just to win, but to make sure everybody gets due process, and due process meant he should get the advantage of each and every constitutional guarantee. I intended that Thompson should get due process, even if he didn’t want it.

So I started parroting what I’d been taught. I spent the next twenty minutes lecturing this man on the fine points of constitutional law, trying to make him understand why the judge appointed me and why it would be better for everybody if he let me do my job.

He listened patiently, and I was sure he understood every word, so by the time I was finished I was satisfied with the job I had done and was totally convinced I had won him over. Throughout my lecture he had said nothing. Now he seemed to agree that I had a part to play in this drama.

“I guess maybe I’d better tell you the whole story, Mr. Anwalt. By the way, did you say our discussions were privileged?”

“Yes sir,” I replied confidently. “Whatever you tell me is totally secret, uh, with a very few exceptions, and I can’t repeat any of it without your prior consent. Furthermore, I can’t be compelled to reveal what you tell me.”

“What are the exceptions?”

“Well, mostly, they deal with communications that promote crimes or fraud. If I knew, for instance, that you intended to offer perjured testimony in the case I’d have to tell on you, but this is the only important exception in criminal cases.”

“I see. Does that mean I can tell you the details of my crime and you can’t repeat them to anybody else?”

I gulped, then answered. “Yes, it does.”

“Motive too?”

“Motive too,” I answered. “B-but you have to understand that guilt isn’t the only issue in a criminal trial. You also have punishment to consider, and even if you’re guilty—”

“I understand all that, Mr. Anwalt. I want you to know I’m not a total ingrate, I do appreciate that you want to do your best on your first case—”

“How did you know that?”

“The guard told me you just got licensed. Stuff like that gets around in a place like this, you know.”

Thompson reached over and grabbed my wrist, so that he could look at my watch. “Chow’s in thirty minutes,” he said, “such as it is. We’d better get on with it.”

“Yes, sir.” I pulled out my recorder so I could make a record.

“None of that, Mr. Anwalt, not even any notes. Otherwise I will not utter another word. I only agreed to talk to you for your sake. Do you understand that?”

I had no choice, so I nodded.

“I’m no spring chicken,” he began. “When I was born Herbert Hoover was president. The first phase of the war to end all wars had been over for fourteen years, and the man who was to provoke the second phase had not yet taken power in Germany.

“Edison had just died, but many of the other scientific and industrial giants were still around. Orville Wright and Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, to name a few. Einstein had not yet come to this country. Enrico Fermi was a young whippersnapper like you. There were giants all around me.

“There wasn’t any such thing as molecular biology in those days. I started out where the oldtimers like Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver, who incidentally was also still around, had left off. For most of my career my methods hadn’t changed all that much from theirs. These guys were solid researchers and they developed good techniques.”

He paused, apparently to savor this reflection on happier times.

I couldn’t yet tell what he was getting at, but he was in control, and if I wanted to hear anything I had to listen to all of it.

“Times changed so much during my lifetime,” he continued. “We went from national optimism to national gloom, from a land of inexhaustible resources to a land of scarcities, from a nation of exporters to a nation of importers, from an oil glut to an oil crisis. During my lifetime man first realized that while he could not yet destroy the planet he was fully capable of destroying himself.

“This is why I decided I had to do something to change that. I did it, and it was working, but Gonzalez didn’t care about the world. He was a cowardly little man with a puny little intellect and all he cared about was how much money he could get for what he knew. This is why I killed him, Mr. Anwalt.”

“Gonzalez was blackmailing you?”

“He was trying to. I didn’t give in, as you can see. I shut him up for good.” Thompson’s voice sounded absolutely icy, totally out of character with the civilized man he had been before.

“I—I don’t know much about him, Dr. Thompson, except they said on TV he was from Venezuela.”

“He worked for me at one time, Mr. Anwalt, but it wasn’t in a scientific capacity. He was the helicopter pilot I used on my expeditions into the rain forest. I hadn’t seen or heard from him in almost five years. Then, suddenly, last week he turned up right here in town. He wanted money.” Thompson paused again. “Tell me, Mr. Anwalt, how much do you really know about me?”

“I’ve seen the movie they made about you,” I answered truthfully. “Then, of course, there’s what I heard on TV and what I read about you when you were arrested. They say that when you discovered the oilbush you changed the course of history, and I guess you probably did.”

The old man’s face now had a distinct smirk on it, as though regardless of what he had done he was daring the world to hate him for killing Gonzalez. It didn’t take long for the significance of that look to sink in, and in that instant I thought I had him figured out.

It wasn’t supposed to work that way, I knew. Nobody was supposed to get a break from the law because of who he was; everybody was supposed to get equal treatment. But I was a realist. I knew that in practice famous people did get treated better and poor people were treated worse.

I felt a little sick when it occurred to me that Thompson thought his fame dispensed with the need for a lawyer, that he confidently expected the law would go light on him because of who he was.

But in one reckless, nonchalant utterance, he destroyed my theory. “I didn’t discover the oilbush,” he said.

That remark sent my mind reeling. My carefully evolving explanation collapsed.

The discovery of that bush down in the Amazon ranked among the miracles of the ages. In one fell swoop the discovery of this prosaic-looking plant had not only eliminated the world’s energy crisis, it had stopped the devastators of Earth’s rain forests in their tracks.

A new theory sprang up to fill the void. “A-are y-you trying to tell me that somebody else discovered it? Was it Gonzalez? Was that why he was blackmailing you?”

Thompson’s face had lost the smirk. Now he was deadpan and serious. “I wish it was that simple. The truth is that what has happened already is bound to cause exactly the same kind of speculation you just made, and that could be disastrous. If I stood trial, even if I didn’t testify, things would be enormously worse. I wish you’d try to understand that it’s not only better for me but better for the world that I plead guilty and go quietly away to prison. I won’t be around that much longer anyhow.”

I was determined not to let it go at that. “As your lawyer, Dr. Thompson, I’m obligated to respect your wishes as long as I consider them to be in your best interest legally.” I tried to sound firm.

“But,” I added, “I can’t determine what your best interests are unless I know the unvarnished truth, and I don’t. You say, for instance, that you didn’t discover the oilbush, and I gather from that statement and from the fact that you were being blackmailed that Gonzalez was claiming he did…”

“Nobody did.” Thompson’s face was solemn and grim.

“B-but I remember—from the movie, the helicopter landed and you jumped out with this bundle, and you said—”

“Some actor said it. And yes, I know this is really the way it was, but it was all staged. Gonzalez was just a mope, an airplane driver, somebody to get me around the forest, somebody to interpret for me. I paid him well for that, well enough so that he should have kept his mouth shut.”

It was maddening, waiting for the old man to make his point. I knew he must have one, he was completely methodical in every other way. I asked him point blank, “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t him, who did discover it?”

“I told you, son, nobody. Nobody discovered it. I made it, in my lab, right here in Texas, and then I took a bunch of them down to Venezuela and planted them all over the place. That’s what Gonzalez was threatening to tell everybody.”

“You made the oilbush?”

“Yeah, I made it. Well, it’s true that in a sense I did discover it, but then it didn’t look anything like it does now, and it didn’t produce much oil—and I didn’t get it from the rain forest. I found it growing in a swamp in North Carolina.”

“Why the big production about Venezuela, then?”

“Because solving the world’s oil crisis would merely have aggravated other problems without some additional compensations. Fossil fuels were already under an enormous pressure from environmentalists because they raised carbon dioxide levels at the same time when the principal consumers of that gas were being reduced. I decided that if I altered the former and not the latter the net effect would be oblivion, so I developed the oilbush as a tropical plant.

“That wasn’t easy to do. In fact, it’d be much more efficient and productive if grown in groves like oranges are. I purposely made it extra sensitive to ultraviolet. That way, changes in the level of UV would hurt it more than any other essential crop and the best place to grow it would be under the rain forest canopy.”

“I see.” I didn’t really. To me it sounded like a cock and bush story.

“I’m not convinced you do see, Mr. Anwalt. The problem I had then was that what I could do, other molecular biologists could undo, and they could do that much more easily if they knew what my original stock had been.

“Even Gonzalez didn’t know that, but he did know that no precursor of the oilbush had ever grown in the rain forest and no mature plant could be found there anytime close to when I claimed my discovery. I knew that if any real expert was to pick up on that idea the whole thing would crash.”

Again, Thompson’s face became grim. “The best way to see that this doesn’t happen is to keep my murder of Gonzalez strictly personal, let the world think exactly what you thought—that I stole his discovery. After all, there is precedent for that, because often in the past it’s been the old, established scientist who got credit for the discoveries of subordinates.

“Let the world think this is what I did. That way maybe nobody will ever find out where the real oilbush came from, and maybe the people who are trying to break the monopoly of the tropical countries will be a while longer taking this away from them. Let the people of this world remember how it was with rubber back in the last century. Let them speculate, no—let them fear what might be just around the next bend of the river, waiting for them to discover.

“The way things are now these countries are making a bundle off the oilbush. Their people are happy out there in the jungle tending little plots under the big trees. At the moment, the shelter of the rain forest is worth more to them than either the lumber in the trees or the minerals beneath them, worth enough more so that they can afford to grow oil and import food from countries with climates too cold for the oilbush to tolerate.”

The old man was now getting a trifle didactic, I thought. Still, what he was saying was finally making sense, and a lot of sense at that. So long as the big industrial countries needed the fuel to run their cars and trucks and tractors, there would be a market for what the tropical countries produced; and so long as the oil producers had money they would be the primary buyers of the food and machinery and textiles the oil consumers produced. Furthermore, now that they had a grip on their runaway populations and a means of stabilizing their economies, the oilbush-growing countries would also have the incentive to protect other undiscovered botanical bonanzas that the forests presently concealed. There would always be a fear that, as with rubber, the boom could turn to bust overnight.

I had it figured out.

Thompson could tell, presumably from the expression on my face. “Tell you what, son,” he said calmly, “you just let me lead the way, while you take care of the technical details. See to it that 1 get to plead with as little publicity as possible, and let it go at that. I know what they’re going to do with me already.”

“Y-you do?”

“Sure. You think I haven’t been smart enough to copper my bets? Let me ask you this, Mr. Anwalt. If you were the state of Texas, and you used to be the kingpin of the national energy industry but now you get almost all your fuel from some other country, and you knew that it was only a matter of time until somebody like me cracked the secret of temperate cultivation, what would you do with me?”

“P-put you to work in a lab someplace under minimal supervision and hope you cracked it before somebody else did. After all, you’re not likely to repeat your crime.”

“Exactly.”

“But you’ll never quite make it, will you?”

“Wrong. You see, I already have. I did it years ago, simultaneously with my development of the tropical variety. You see, I do have a sense of civil responsibility, Mr. Anwalt. I couldn’t take a chance that my country might also be blackmailed by unscrupulous and irresponsible leaders of producing countries. That’s happened before, with petroleum-producing nations.

“This is where you can really do me some service. All the details are locked up in my safe, and I want you to take charge of them. I don’t need to remind you that I’m a wealthy man, Mr. Anwalt, and I promise you that if you do follow my instructions and keep my secret you’ll never miss a meal.”

I was stunned. Basically, what the man was asking me to do was to con the whole world. Aside from ethical considerations there were practical objections. I wasn’t altogether certain I was up to it. “Let me think about that for a minute,” I said.

It didn’t take that long. Thompson was right, I knew that almost instinctively. Nobody with a monopoly can be trusted not to get greedy and squeeze the customers. In time, ambitious national leaders would overspend their national incomes and go into hock with international bankers, and the bankers would certainly be tempted to goose up the revenue even if the growing countries didn’t. Natural petroleum couldn’t take up the slack if that happened; there wasn’t enough of it left anymore, and what there was was far too valuable as chemical feedstock for the world’s plastic industries.

That left no alternative. Somebody 100 percent trustworthy and utterly reliable had to take charge of this thing and look after the welfare of the human race. There was only one person I had that much confidence in, and that was me.

“OK, Dr. Thompson,” I answered finally, trying to sound thoroughly overawed with the idea, “I find myself compelled to agree with you.”

“Good. Now, about this court appointment thing, that looks a little awkward. Is there any reason why I couldn’t just hire you to take care of my plea?”

“None that I can think of.”

“Good, that’s settled. Suppose you get busy and work up a retainer agreement. Naturally, I’ll need somebody to take care of all my business interests while I’m locked up, so why not you? Uh—except for the technical stuff, like patents. I’ve always wanted to set up a research foundation but I never had the time for it before. Now that it appears I will have time on my hands and somebody with enough youth and ambition to get it done, there’s no reason to put it off any longer. That’ll also insure that there’ll always be somebody who can launch the temporate strain, if it’s necessary, and even if I’m dead.”

I gulped, but couldn’t talk. The words were in my head but I couldn’t get my tongue interested in saying them. The way things had been, up until this afternoon, this development was absolutely miraculous.

Finally, after a long silence I managed to find my voice. “I’ll try to live up to your expectations, Dr. Thompson.”

He looked at me very sternly for long moments before he said another word. “I know you will. If you don’t, I’ll tell. As I understood you, the lawyer-client privilege is mine alone to claim, and while what I did was not really illegal it will infuriate some people. You’re making yourself my accomplice, you know.”

“I know,” I replied. I knew he wasn’t really threatening me. Had I thought otherwise I would simply have gotten up and walked out. What he was really doing was testing me, trying to raise my temper. I also knew that chance alone had given me an opportunity anybody else I knew would kill to get. I was not here because I was brighter that the rest, or more honorable, or for any other noble reason. It was simply the luck of the draw. I understood Thompson very well, and I knew that compared to what he had personally risked I was risking almost nothing. Our Earth, I said to myself, is worth that much, and I hoped our mutual luck would hold.