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Part One

THE SUMMER ASSOCIATE

Chapter 1

EVEN BY THE HEADY NORM of millennial boomtown Manhattan, where
master craftsmen paint frescoes on subway walls, the new law
offices of Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel were over the top. If the
great downtown courthouses around Broadway were palaces of justice,
the gleaming fortyeight- story tower at 454 Lexington Avenue was a
monument to winning.

My name is Jack Mullen, and as a summer associate at Nelson,
Goodwin, I guess I was winning, too. Still, it wasn't exactly what
I had in mind when I entered Columbia Law School at the advanced
age of twenty-six. But when a secondyear student with $50,000 in
college loans is offered a summer position at the most prestigious
firm in the city, he doesn't turn it down.

The phone started ringing the instant I stepped into my small
office.

I picked up. Female operator on tape: "You have a collect call from
Huntsville, Texas, from..."

Male voice, also recorded: "The Mudman." Female operator again on
tape: "If you wish to accept, please say yes or push the
number—"

"Yes, absolutely," I interrupted. "Mudman, how are you?" "Not bad,
Jack, except maybe for the fact that the state of Texas is pissing
its pants at the thought of putting me down like a dog." "Dumb
question."

The surprisingly high-pitched voice at the other end of the line
belonged to outlaw biker Billy "Mudman" Simon, and it was coming
from the pay phone in Huntsville Prison's death row. Mudman was
there waiting for the lethal injection that would put him to death
for murdering his teenage girlfriend nineteen years earlier.

Mudman is no saint. He admits to all manner of misdemeanors and an
occasional felony during his run in the Houston chapter of the
Diablos. But killing Carmina Velasquez, he says, wasn't one of
them.

"Carmina was a great woman," the Mudman told me the first time I
interviewed him. "One of my best friends in this miserable world.
But I was never in love with her. So why would I kill her?"

His letters, trial transcripts, and records of repeated failed
attempts to win a new trial were dropped on my desk three days
after I started working for the firm. After two weeks decoding
every wildly misspelled word, contorted phrase, and hundreds of
footnotes painstakingly transcribed in tiny block letters that
looked as if they had come from the unsteady hand of a
grade-schooler, I was convinced he was telling the truth.

And I liked him. He was smart and funny, and he didn't feel sorry
for himself, despite a truckload of reasons why he should. Ninety
percent of the convicts on death row were as good as screwed the
day they were born, and Mudman, with his deranged junkie parents,
was no different.

Nevertheless, he had no enthusiasm for blaming them for what had
happened.

"They did their best, like everyone else," he said the one time I
mentioned them. "Their best sucked, but let 'em rest in
peace."

Rick Exley, my supervisor on the project, couldn't have cared less
about Mudman's character or my rookie intuition. What mattered to
him was that there were no witnesses to Velasquez's murder and that
the Mudman had been convicted completely on the basis of blood and
hair samples from the crime scene. That all happened before the
forensic breakthrough of DNA testing. It meant we had a reasonable
chance to be granted our request that blood and hair samples be
taken to confirm that they matched the DNA of the physical evidence
held in a vault somewhere in Lubbock.

"I'd hate to get your hopes up for nothing, but if the state lets
us test, we could get a stay of execution."

"Don't ever worry about getting my hopes up for nothing, Jack.
Where I'm at, insane hope is welcome anytime. Bring 'em on."

I was trying not to get too excited myself. I knew this pro bono
project, with the pompous name of "the Innocence Quest," was
primarily a PR stunt and that Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel didn't
build forty-eight stories in midtown by looking out for the
innocent poor on death row.

Still, when the Mudman was cut off after his allotted fifteen
minutes, my hands were shaking.

Excerpted from THE BEACH HOUSE © Copyright 2002 by
SueJack, Inc. Reprinted with permission by PUBLISHER. All rights
reserved.