I stood up and reached into my coat pocket for a card. I put it down on the glass.
“Those are all my numbers. Call anytime.”
I hoped he would tell me to sit back down and we’d start planning for trial. But Elliot just reached over and picked up the card. He seemed to be studying it when I left him. Before I reached the door to the office it opened from the outside and Mrs. Albrecht stood there. She smiled warmly.
“I’m sure we will be in touch,” she said.
I had a feeling that she’d heard every word that had been spoken between me and her boss.
“Thank you, Mrs. Albrecht,” I said. “I certainly hope so.”
Fourteen
I found Cisco leaning against the Lincoln, smoking a cigarette.
“That was fast,” he said.
I opened the back door in case there were cameras in the parking lot and Elliot was watching me.
“Look at you with the encouraging word.”
I got in and he did the same.
“I’m just saying that it seemed kind of quick,” he said. “How’d it go?”
“I gave it my best shot. We’ll probably know something soon.”
“You think he did it?”
“Probably, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve got other things to worry about.”
It was hard to go from thinking about a quarter-million-dollar fee to some of the also-rans on Vincent’s client list, but that was the job. I opened my bag and pulled out the other active files. It was time to decide where our next stop was going to be.
Cisco backed out of the space and started heading toward the arch.
“Lorna’s waiting to hear,” he said.
I looked up at him in the mirror.
“What?”
“Lorna called me while you were inside. She really wants to know what happened with Elliot.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll call her. First let me figure out where we’re going.”
The address of each client—at least the address given upon signing for Vincent’s services—was printed neatly on the outside of each file. I quickly checked through the files, looking for addresses in Hollywood. I finally came across the file belonging to the woman charged with indecent exposure. The client who had come to Vincent’s office earlier to ask for the return of her file.
“Here we go,” I said. “When you get out of here, head down Melrose to La Brea. We’ve got a client right there. One of the ones who came in today for her file.”
“Got it.”
“After that stop, I’ll ride in the front seat. Don’t want you to feel too much like a chauffeur.”
“It ain’t a bad gig. I think I could get used to it.”
I got out my phone.
“Hey, Mick, I gotta tell you something,” Cisco said.
I took my thumb off the speed-dial button for Lorna.
“Yeah, what?”
“I just wanted to tell you myself before you heard it somewhere else. Me and Lorna… we’re gonna get married.”
I had figured that they were headed in that direction. Lorna and I had been friends for fifteen years before we were married for one. It had been a rebound marriage for me and as ill-advised as anything I had ever done. We ended it when we realized the mistake and somehow managed to remain close. There was no one I trusted more in the world. We were no longer in love but I still loved her and would always protect her.
“That okay with you, Mick?”
I looked at Cisco in the rearview.
“I’m not part of the equation, Cisco.”
“I know but I want to know if it’s okay with you. Know what I mean?”
I looked out the window and thought a moment before answering. Then I looked back at him in the mirror.
“Yes, it’s all right with me. But I’ll tell you something, Cisco. She’s one of the four most important people in my life. You have maybe seventy-five pounds on me—and granted, all of them in muscle. But if you hurt her, I’m going to find a way to hurt you back. That okay with you?”
He looked away from the mirror to the road ahead. We were in the exit line, moving slowly. The striking writers were massing out on the sidewalk and delaying the people trying to leave the studio.
“Yeah, Mick, I’m okay with that.”
We were silent for a while after that as we inched along. Cisco kept glancing at me in the mirror.
“What?” I finally asked.
“Well, I got your daughter. That makes one. And then Lorna. I was wondering who the other two were.”
Before I could answer, the electronic version of the William Tell Overture started to play in my hand. I looked down at my phone. It said PRIVATE CALLER on the screen. I opened it up.
“Haller.”
“Please hold for Walter Elliot,” Mrs. Albrecht said.
Not much time went by before I heard the familiar voice.
“Mr. Haller?”
“I’m here. What can I do for you?”
I felt the stirring of anxiety in my gut. He had decided.
“Have you noticed something about my case, Mr. Haller?”
The question caught me off guard.
“How do you mean?”
“One lawyer. I have one lawyer, Mr. Haller. You see, I not only must win this case in court but I must also win it in the court of public opinion.”
“I see,” I said, though I didn’t quite understand the point.
“In the last ten years I’ve picked a lot of winners. I’m talking about films in which I invested my money. I picked winners because I believe I have an accurate sense of public opinion and taste. I know what people like because I know what they are thinking.”
“I’m sure you do, sir.”
“And I think that the public believes that the more guilty you are, the more lawyers you need.”
He wasn’t wrong about that.
“So the first thing I said to Mr. Vincent when I hired him was, no dream team, just you. We had a second lawyer on board early on but that was temporary. She served a purpose and was gone. One lawyer, Mr. Haller. That’s how I want it. The best one lawyer I can get.”
“I under—”
“I’ve decided, Mr. Haller. You impressed me when you were in here. I would like to engage your services for trial. You will be my one lawyer.”
I had to calm my voice before answering.
“I’m glad to hear that. Call me Mickey.”
“And you can call me Walter. But I insist on one condition before we agree to this arrangement.”
“What is that?”
“No delay. We go to trial on schedule. I want to hear you say it.”
I hesitated. I wanted a delay. But I wanted the case more.
“We won’t delay,” I said. “We’ll be ready to go next Thursday.”
“Then, welcome aboard. What do we do next?”
“Well, I’m still on the lot. I could turn around and come back.”
“I’m afraid I have meetings until seven and then a screening of our film for the awards season.”
I thought that his trial and freedom would have trumped his meetings and movies but I let it go. I would educate Walter Elliot and bring him to reality the next time I saw him.
“Okay, then, for now you give me a fax number and I’ll have my assistant send over a contract. It will have the same fee structure as you had with Jerry Vincent.”
There was silence and I waited. If he was going to try to knock down the fee, this is when he would do it. But instead he repeated a fax number I could hear Mrs. Albrecht giving him. I wrote it down on the outside of one of the files.
“What’s tomorrow look like, Walter?”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes, if not tonight, then tomorrow. We need to get started. You don’t want a delay; I want to be even more prepared than I am now. We need to talk and go over things. There are a few gaps in the defense case and I think you can help me fill them in. I could come back to the studio or meet you anywhere else in the after
noon.”
I heard muffled voices as he conferred with Mrs. Albrecht.
“I have a four o’clock open,” he finally said. “Here at the bungalow.”
“Okay, I’ll be there. And cancel whatever you have at five. We’re going to need at least a couple hours to start.”
Elliot agreed to the two hours and we were about to end the conversation, when I thought of something else.
“Walter, I want to see the crime scene. Can I get into the house in Malibu tomorrow sometime before we meet?”
Again there was a pause.
“When?”
“You tell me what will work.”
Again he covered the phone and I heard his muffled conversation with Mrs. Albrecht. Then he came back on the line with me.
“How about eleven? I’ll have someone meet you there to let you in.”
“That’ll work. See you tomorrow, Walter.”
I closed the phone and looked at Cisco in the mirror.
“We got him.”
Cisco hit the Lincoln’s horn in celebration. It was a long blast that made the driver in front of us hold up a fist and send us back the finger. Out in the street the striking writers took the blast as a sign of support from inside the hated studio. I heard a loud cheer go up from the masses.
Fifteen
Bosch arrived early the next morning. He was alone. His peace offering was the extra cup of coffee he carried and handed over to me. I don’t drink coffee anymore—trying to avoid any addiction in my life—but I took it from him anyway, thinking that maybe the smell of caffeine would get me going. It was only 7:45 but I had been in Jerry Vincent’s office for more than two hours already.
I led Bosch back into the file room. He looked more tired than I felt and I was pretty sure he was in the same suit he’d been wearing when I saw him the day before.
“Long night?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Chasing leads or chasing tail?”
It was a question I had once heard one detective ask another in a courthouse hallway. I guess it was a question reserved for brothers of the badge because it didn’t go over so well with Bosch. He made some sort of guttural noise and didn’t answer.
In the file room I told him to have a seat at the small table. There was a yellow legal tablet on the table, but no files. I took the other seat and put my coffee down.
“So,” I said, picking up the legal pad.
“So,” Bosch said when I offered nothing else.
“So I met with Judge Holder in chambers yesterday and worked out a plan by which we can give you what you need from the files without actually giving you the files.”
Bosch shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You should’ve told me this yesterday at Parker Center,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wasted my time.”
“I thought you’d appreciate this.”
“It’s not going to work.”
“How do you know that? How can you be sure?”
“How many homicides have you investigated, Haller? And how many have you cleared?”
“All right, point taken. You’re the homicide guy. But I am certainly capable of reviewing files and discerning what constituted a legitimate threat to Jerry Vincent. Possibly because of my experience as a criminal defense attorney I could even perceive a threat that you would miss in your capacity as a detective.”
“So you say.”
“Yeah, I say.”
“Look, all I’m pointing out here is the obvious. I’m the detective. I’m the one who should look through the files because I know what I am looking for. No offense, but you are an amateur at this. So I’m in a position here where I have to take what an amateur is giving me and trust that I’m getting everything there is to get from the files. It doesn’t work that way. I don’t trust the evidence unless I find it myself.”
“Again, your point is well taken, Detective, but this is the way it is. This is the only method Judge Holder approved, and I gotta tell you that you’re lucky to get this much. She wasn’t interested in helping you out at all.”
“So you’re saying you went to bat for me?”
He said it in a disbelieving, sarcastic tone, as if it were some sort of a mathematical impossibility for a defense attorney to help a police detective.
“That’s right,” I said defiantly. “I went to bat for you. I told you yesterday, Jerry Vincent was a friend. I’d like to see you take down the person who took him down.”
“You’re probably worried about your own ass, too.”
“I’m not denying that.”
“If I were you I would be.”
“Look, do you want the list or not?”
I held the legal pad up as if I were teasing a dog with a toy. He reached for it and I pulled it back, immediately regretting the move. I quickly handed it to him. It was an awkward exchange, like shaking hands had been the day before.
“There are eleven names on that list, with a brief summary of the threat each made to Jerry Vincent. We were lucky that Jerry thought it was important to memorialize an account of each threat he received. I’ve never done that.”
Bosch didn’t respond. He was reading the first page of the legal pad.
“I prioritized them,” I said.
Bosch looked at me and I knew he was ready to step on me again for assuming the role of detective. I raised a hand to stop him.
“Not from the standpoint of your investigation. From the standpoint of being a lawyer. Of putting myself in Jerry Vincent’s shoes and looking at these things and determining which ones would concern me the most. Like the first one on that list. James Demarco. The guy goes away on weapons charges and thinks Jerry fucked up the case. A guy like that can get a gun as soon as he gets out.”
Bosch nodded and dropped his eyes back to the legal pad. He spoke without looking up from it.
“What else do you have for me?”
“What do you mean?”
He looked at me and waved the pad up and down as if it were as light as a feather and the information on it was equally so.
“I’ll run these names and see where these guys are at now. Maybe your gunrunner is out and about and looking for revenge. But these are dead cases. Most likely if these threats were legit, they would’ve been carried out long ago. Same with any threats he got when he was a prosecutor. So this is just busywork you’re giving me, Counselor.”
“Busywork? Some of those guys threatened him when they were being led off to prison. Maybe some of them are out. Maybe one just got out and made good on the threat. Maybe they contracted it out from prison. There are a lot of possibilities and they shouldn’t be dismissed as just busywork. I don’t understand your attitude on this.”
Bosch smiled and shook his head. I remembered my father doing the same thing when he was about to tell me as a five-year-old that I had misunderstood something.
“I don’t really care what you think about my attitude,” he said. “We’ll check your leads out. But I’m looking for something a little more current. Something from Vincent’s open cases.”
“Well, I can’t help you there.”
“Sure you can. You have all the cases now. I assume you are reviewing them and meeting all your new clients. You’re going to come across something or see something or hear something that doesn’t fit, that doesn’t seem right, that maybe scares you a little bit. That’s when you call me.”
I stared at him without answering.
“You never know,” he said. “It might save you from…”
He shrugged and didn’t finish, but the message was clear. He was trying to scare me into cooperating far more than Judge Holder was allowing, or than I felt comfortable with.
“It’s one thing sharing threat information from closed cases,” I said. “It’s another thing entirely to do it with active cases. And besides that, I know you are asking for more than just threats. You think Jerry stumbled across something or had some knowledge that got h
im killed.”
Bosch kept his eyes on me and slowly nodded. I was the first to look away.
“What about it being a two-way street, Detective? What do you know that you aren’t telling me? What was in the laptop that was so important? What was in the portfolio?”
“I can’t talk to you about an active investigation.”
“You could yesterday when you asked about the FBI.”
He looked at me and squinted his dark eyes.
“I didn’t ask you about the FBI.”
“Come on, Detective. You asked if he had any federal cases. Why would you do that unless you have some sort of federal connection? I’m guessing it was the FBI.”
Bosch hesitated. I had a feeling I had guessed right and now he was in a corner. My mentioning the bureau would make him think I knew something. Now he would have to give in order to get.
“This time you go first,” I prompted.
He nodded.
“Okay, the killer took Jerry Vincent’s cell phone—either off his body or it was in his briefcase.”
“Okay.” “I got the call records yesterday right before I saw you. On the day he was killed he got three calls from the bureau. Four days before that, there were two. He was talking to somebody over there. Or they were talking to him.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell. All outgoing calls from over there register on the main number. All I know is he got calls from the bureau, no names.”
“How long were the calls?”
Bosch hesitated, unsure what to divulge. He looked down at the tablet in his hand and I saw him grudgingly decide to share more. He was going to get angry when I had nothing to share back.
“They were all short calls.”
“How short?”
“None of them over a minute.”
“Then, maybe they were just wrong numbers.”
He shook his head.
“That’s too many wrong numbers. They wanted something from him.”
The Brass Verdict Page 10