The Lincoln Lawyer

by Michael Connelly

  “I wouldn’t know that. I am not an expert in that field.”

  “How about the pornographic videos? Did you write down the titles?”

  “No, I did not. Again, I did not believe that it was pertinent to the investigation of who had brutally assaulted this woman.”

  “Do you recall if the subject matter of any of the videos involved sadomasochism or bondage or anything of that nature?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Now, did you instruct Ms. Campo to get rid of those tapes and the clothing from the closet before members of Mr. Roulet’s defense team could view the apartment?”

  “I certainly did not.”

  I checked that one off my list and moved on.

  “Have you ever spoken to Mr. Roulet about what happened in Ms. Campo’s apartment that night?”

  “No, he lawyered up before I got to him.”

  “Do you mean he exercised his constitutional right to remain silent?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what he did.”

  “So, as far as you know, he never spoke to the police about what happened.”

  “That is correct.”

  “In your opinion, was Ms. Campo struck with great force?”

  “I would say so, yes. Her face was very badly cut and swollen.”

  “Then please tell the jury about the impact injuries you found on Mr. Roulet’s hands.”

  “He had wrapped a cloth around his fist to protect it. There were no injuries on his hands that I could see.”

  “Did you document this lack of injury?”

  Booker looked puzzled by the question.

  “No,” he said.

  “So you had Ms. Campo’s injuries documented by photographs but you didn’t see the need to document Mr. Roulet’s lack of injuries, correct?”

  “It didn’t seem to me to be necessary to photograph something that wasn’t there.”

  “How do you know he wrapped his fist in a cloth to protect it?”

  “Ms. Campo told me she saw that his hand was wrapped right before he punched her at the door.”

  “Did you find this cloth he supposedly wrapped his hand in?”

  “Yes, it was in the apartment. It was a napkin, like from a restaurant. It had her blood on it.”

  “Did it have Mr. Roulet’s blood on it?”

  “No.”

  “Was there anything that identified it as belonging to the defendant?”

  “No.”

  “So we have Ms. Campo’s word for it, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  I let some time pass while I scribbled a note on my pad. I then continued to question the detective.

  “Detective, when did you learn that Louis Roulet denied assaulting or threatening Ms. Campo and that he would be vigorously defending himself against the charges?”

  “That would have been when he hired you, I guess.”

  There was a murmur of laughter in the courtroom.

  “Did you pursue other explanations for Ms. Campo’s injuries?”

  “No, she told me what happened. I believed her. He beat her and was going to —”

  “Thank you, Detective Booker. Just try to answer the question I ask.”

  “I was.”

  “If you looked for no other explanation because you believed the word of Ms. Campo, is it safe to say that this whole case relies upon her word and what she said occurred in her apartment on the night of March sixth?”

  Booker deliberated a moment. He knew I was leading him into a trap of his own words. As the saying goes, there is no trap so deadly as the one you set for yourself.

  “It’s not just her word,” he said after thinking he saw a way out. “There is physical evidence. The knife. Her injuries. More than just her word on this.”

  He nodded affirmatively.

  “But doesn’t the state’s explanation for her injuries and the other evidence begin with her telling of what happened?”

  “You could say that, yes,” he said reluctantly.

  “She is the tree on which all of these fruits grow, is she not?”

  “I probably wouldn’t use those words.”

  “Then what words would you use, Detective?”

  I had him now. Booker was literally squirming in his seat. Minton stood up and objected, saying I was badgering the witness. It must have been something he had seen on TV or in a movie. He was told to sit down by the judge.

  “You can answer the question, Detective,” the judge said.

  “What was the question?” Booker asked, trying to buy some time.

  “You disagreed with me when I characterized Ms. Campo as the tree from which all the evidence in the case grows,” I said. “If I am wrong, how would you describe her position in this case?”

  Booker raised his hands in a quick gesture of surrender.

  “She’s the victim! Of course she’s important because she told us what happened. We have to rely on her to set the course of the investigation.”

  “You rely on her for quite a bit in this case, don’t you? Victim and chief witness against the defendant, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who else saw the defendant attack Ms. Campo?”

  “Nobody else.”

  I nodded, to underline the answer for the jury. I looked over and exchanged eye contact with those in the front row.

  “Okay, Detective,” I said. “I want to ask you about Charles Talbot now. How did you find out about this man?”

  “Uh, the prosecutor, Mr. Minton, told me to find him.”

  “And do you know how Mr. Minton came to know about his existence?”

  “I believe you were the one who informed him. You had a videotape from a bar that showed him with the victim a couple hours before the attack.”

  I knew this could be the point to introduce the video but I wanted to wait on that. I wanted the victim on the stand when I showed the tape to the jury.

  “And up until that point you didn’t think it was important to find this man?”

  “No, I just didn’t know about him.”

  “So when you finally did know about Talbot and you located him, did you have his left hand examined to determine if he had any injuries that could have been sustained while punching someone repeatedly in the face?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Is that because you were confident in your choice of Mr. Roulet as the person who punched Regina Campo?”

  “It wasn’t a choice. It was where the investigation led. I didn’t locate Charles Talbot until more than two weeks after the crime occurred.”

  “So what you are saying is that if he’d had injuries, they would have been healed by then, correct?”

  “I’m no expert on it but that was my thinking, yes.”

  “So you never looked at his hand, did you?”

  “Not specifically, no.”

  “Did you question any coworkers of Mr. Talbot about whether they saw bruising or other injuries on his hand around the time of the crime?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “So you never really looked beyond Mr. Roulet, did you?”

  “That is wrong. I come into every case with an open mind. But Roulet was there and in custody from the start. The victim identified him as her attacker. He was obviously a focus.”

  “Was he a focus or the focus, Detective Booker?”

  “He was both. At first he was a focus and later—after we found his initials on the weapon that had been held to Reggie Campo’s throat—he became the focus, you could say.”

  “How do you know that knife was held to Ms. Campo’s throat?”

  “Because she told us and she had the puncture wound to show for it.”

  “Are you saying there was some sort of forensic analysis that matched the knife to the wound on her neck?”

  “No, that was impossible.”

  “So again we have Ms. Campo’s word that the knife was held to her throat by Mr. Roulet.”

  “I had no reason to do
ubt her then. I have none now.”

  “Now without any explanation for it, I guess you would consider the knife with the defendant’s initials on it to be a highly important piece of evidence of guilt, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. Even with explanation, I would say. He brought that knife in there with one purpose in mind.”

  “You are a mind reader, are you, Detective?”

  “No, I’m a detective. And I am just saying what I think.”

  “Accent on think.”

  “It’s what I know from the evidence in the case.”

  “I’m glad you are so confident, sir. I have no further questions at this time. I reserve the right to recall Detective Booker as a witness for the defense.”

  I had no intention of calling Booker back to the stand but I thought the threat might sound good to the jury.

  I returned to my seat while Minton tried to bandage up Booker on redirect. The damage was in perceptions and there wasn’t a lot that he could do with that. Booker had only been a setup man for the defense. The real damage would come later.

  After Booker stepped down, the judge called for the mid-morning break. She told the jurors to be back in fifteen minutes but I knew the break would last longer. Judge Fullbright was a smoker and had already faced highly publicized administrative charges for sneaking smokes in her chambers. That meant that for her to take care of her habit and avoid further scandal, she had to take the elevator down and leave the building and stand in the entry port where the jail buses come in. I figured I had at least a half hour.

  I went out into the hallway to talk to Mary Alice Windsor and work my cell phone. It looked like I would be putting on witnesses in the afternoon session.

  I was first approached by Roulet, who wanted to talk about my cross-examination of Booker.

  “It looked to me like it went really well for us,” he said.

  “Us?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You can’t tell whether it’s gone well until you get the verdict. Now leave me alone, Louis. I have to make some calls. And where is your mother? I am probably going to need her this afternoon. Is she going to be here?”

  “She had an appointment this morning but she’ll be here. Just call Cecil and he’ll bring her in.”

  After he walked away Detective Booker took his place, walking up to me and pointing a finger in my face.

  “It’s not going to fly, Haller,” he said.

  “What’s not going to fly?” I asked.

  “Your whole bullshit defense. You’re going to crash and burn.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see. You know, you have some balls trying to trash Talbot with this. Some balls. You must need a wheelbarrow to carry them around in.”

  “I’m just doing my job, Detective.”

  “And some job it is. Lying for a living. Tricking people from looking at the truth. Living in a world without truth. Let me ask you something. You know the difference between a catfish and a lawyer?”

  “No, what’s the difference?”

  “One’s a bottom-feeding, shit-eating scum sucker. The other’s a fish.”

  “That’s a good one, Detective.”

  He left me then and I stood there smiling. Not because of the joke or the understanding that Lankford had probably been the one to elevate the insult from defense attorneys to all of lawyerdom when he had retold the joke to Booker. I smiled because the joke was confirmation that Lankford and Booker were in communication. They were talking and it meant that things were moving and in play. My plan was still holding together. I still had a chance.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  E very trial has a main event. A witness or a piece of evidence that becomes the fulcrum upon which everything swings one way or the other. In this case the main event was billed as Regina Campo, victim and accuser, and the case would seem to rest upon her performance and testimony. But a good defense attorney always has an understudy and I had mine, a witness secretly waiting in the wings upon whom I hoped to shift the weight of the trial.

  Nevertheless, when Minton called Regina Campo to the stand after the break, it was safe to say all eyes were on her as she was led in and walked to the witness box. It was the first time anyone in the jury had seen her in person. It was also the first time I had ever seen her. I was surprised, but not in a good way. She was diminutive and her hesitant walk and slight posture belied the picture of the scheming mercenary I had been building in the jury’s collective consciousness.

  Minton was definitely learning as he was going. With Campo he seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that less was more. He economically led her through the testimony. He first started with personal background before moving on to the events of March 6.

  Regina Campo’s story was sadly unoriginal and that was what Minton was counting on. She told the story of a young, attractive woman coming to Hollywood from Indiana a decade before with hopes of celluloid glory. There were starts and stops to a career, an appearance on a television show here and there. She was a fresh face and there were always men willing to put her in small meaningless parts. But when she was no longer a fresh face, she found work in a series of straight-to-cable films which often required her to appear nude. She supplemented her income with nude modeling jobs and slipped easily into a world of trading sex for favors. Eventually, she skipped the façade altogether and started trading sex for money. It finally brought her to the night she encountered Louis Roulet.

  Regina Campo’s courtroom version of what happened that night did not differ from the accounts offered by all previous witnesses in the trial. But where it was dramatically different was in the delivery. Campo, with her face framed by dark, curly hair, seemed like a little girl lost. She appeared scared and tearful during the latter half of her testimony. Her lower lip and finger shook with fear as she pointed to the man she identified as her attacker. Roulet stared right back, a blank expression on his face.

  “It was him,” she said in a strong voice. “He’s an animal who should be put away!”

  I let that go without objection. I would get my chance with her soon enough. Minton continued the questioning, taking Campo through her escape, and then asked why she had not told the responding officers the truth about knowing who the man who attacked her was and why he was there.

  “I was scared,” she said. “I wasn’t sure they would believe me if I told them why he was there. I wanted to make sure they arrested him because I was very afraid of him.”

  “Do you regret that decision now?”

  “Yes, I do because I know it might help him get free to do this again to somebody.”

  I did object to that answer as prejudicial and the judge sustained it. Minton threw a few more questions at his witness but seemed to know he was past the apex of the testimony and that he should stop before he obscured the trembling finger of identification.

  Campo had testified on direct examination for slightly less than an hour. It was almost 11:30 but the judge did not break for lunch as I had expected. She told the jurors she wanted to get as much testimony in as possible during the day and that they would go to a late, abbreviated lunch. This made me wonder if she knew something I didn’t. Had the Glendale detectives called her during the mid-morning break to warn of my impending arrest?

  “Mr. Haller, your witness,” she said to prompt me and keep things going.

  I went to the lectern with my legal pad and looked at my notes. If I was engaged in a defense of a thousand razors, I had to use at least half of them on this witness. I was ready.

  “Ms. Campo, have you engaged the services of an attorney to sue Mr. Roulet over the alleged events of March sixth?”

  She looked as though she had expected the question, but not as the first one out of the chute.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Have you talked to an attorney about this case?”

  “I haven’t hired anybody to sue him. Right now, all I am interested in is seeing that justice is —�
��

  “Ms. Campo,” I interrupted. “I didn’t ask whether you hired an attorney or what your interests are. I asked if you had talked to an attorney—any attorney—about this case and a possible lawsuit against Mr. Roulet.”

  She was looking closely at me, trying to read me. I had said it with the authority of someone who knew something, who had the goods to back up the charge. Minton had probably schooled her on the most important aspect of testifying: don’t get trapped in a lie.

  “Talked to an attorney, yes. But it was nothing more than talk. I didn’t hire him.”

  “Is that because the prosecutor told you not to hire anybody until the criminal case was over?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Why did you talk to an attorney about this case?”

  She had dropped into a routine of hesitating before every answer. This was fine with me. The perception of most people is that it takes time to tell a lie. Honest responses come easily.

  “I talked to him because I wanted to know my rights and to make sure I was protected.”

  “Did you ask him if you could sue Mr. Roulet for damages?”

  “I thought what you say to your attorney is private.”

  “If you wish, you can tell the jurors what you spoke to the attorney about.”

  There was the first deep slash with the razor. She was in an untenable position. No matter how she answered she would not look good.

  “I think I want to keep it private,” she finally said.

  “Okay, let’s go back to March sixth, but I want to go a little further back than Mr. Minton did. Let’s go back to the bar at Morgan’s when you first spoke to the defendant, Mr. Roulet.”

  “Okay.”

  “What were you doing at Morgan’s that night?”

  “I was meeting someone.”

  “Charles Talbot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, you were meeting him there to sort of size up whether you wanted to lead him back to your place to engage in sex for hire, correct?”

  She hesitated but then nodded.

  “Please answer verbally,” the judge told her.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you say that practice is a safety precaution?”