Bosch reached down and took the photo back.
“It’s my only copy. When will she be in?”
“In about an hour.”
“I’ll come back later. Meantime, Counselor, watch yourself.”
He pointed a finger at me like it was a gun, then turned and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. I sat there thinking about what he had said and staring at the door, half expecting him to come back in and drop another ominous warning on me.
But when the door opened one minute later it was Lorna who entered.
“I just saw that detective in the hallway.”
“Yeah, he was here.”
“What did he want?”
“To scare me.”
“And?”
“He did a pretty good job.”
Twenty-two
Lorna wanted to convene another staff meeting and update me on things that had happened while I was out of the office visiting Malibu and Walter Elliot the day before. She even said I had a court hearing scheduled later on a mystery case that wasn’t on the calendar we had worked up. But I needed some time to think about what Bosch had just revealed and what it meant.
“Where’s Cisco?”
“He’s coming. He left early to meet one of his sources before he came into the office.”
“Did he have breakfast?”
“Not with me.”
“Okay, wait till he gets in and then we’ll go over to the Dining Car and have breakfast. We’ll go over everything then.”
“I already ate breakfast.”
“Then, you can do all the talking while we do all the eating.”
She put a phony frown on her face but went out into the reception office and left me alone. I got up from behind the desk and started to pace the office, hands in my pockets, trying to evaluate what the information from Bosch meant.
According to Bosch, Jerry Vincent had paid a sizable bribe to a person or persons unknown. The fact that the $100,000 came out of the Walter Elliot advance would indicate the bribe was somehow linked to the Elliot case, but this was by no means conclusive. Vincent could easily have used money from Elliot to pay a debt or a bribe relating to another case or something else entirely. It could have been a gambling debt he wanted to hide. The only fact was that Vincent had diverted the $100K from his account to an unknown destination and had wanted to hide the transaction.
Next to consider was the timing of the transaction and whether it was linked to Vincent’s murder. Bosch said the money transfer had gone down five months ago. Vincent’s murder was just three nights before and Elliot’s trial was set to begin in a week. Again there was nothing definitive. The distance between the transaction and the murder seemed to me to strain any possibility of a link between the two.
But still, I could not push the two apart, and the reason for this was Walter Elliot himself. Through the filter of Bosch’s information I now began to fill in some answers and to view my client—and myself—differently. I now saw Elliot’s confidence in his innocence and eventual acquittal coming possibly from his belief that it had already been bought and paid for. I now saw his unwillingness to consider delaying the trial as a timing issue relating to the bribe. And I saw his willingness to quickly allow me to carry the torch for Vincent without checking a single reference as a move made so he could get to the trial without delay. It had nothing to do with any confidence in my skills and tenacity. I had not impressed him. I had simply been the one who showed up. I was simply a lawyer who would work in the scheme of things. In fact, I was perfect. I was pulled out of the lost-and-found bin. I had been on the shelf and was hungry and ready. I could be dusted off and suited up and sent in to replace Vincent, no questions asked.
The reality jolt this sent through me was as uncomfortable as the first night in rehab. But I also understood that this self-knowledge could give me an edge. I was in the middle of some sort of play but at least now I knew it was a play. That was an advantage. I could now make it my own play.
There was a reason for the hurry-up to trial and I now thought I knew what it was. The fix was in. Money had been paid for a specific fix, and that fix was tied to the trial remaining on schedule. The next question in this string was why. Why must the trial take place as scheduled? I didn’t have an answer for that yet but I was going to get it.
I walked over to the windows and split the Venetian blinds with my hand. Out on the street I saw a van from Channel 5 parked with two wheels up on the curb. A camera crew and a reporter were on the sidewalk and they were getting ready to do a live shot, offering their viewers the latest on the Vincent case—the latest being the exact same report given the morning before: no arrests, no suspects, no news.
I left the window and stepped back into the middle of the room to continue my pacing. The next thing I needed to consider was the man in the photograph Bosch showed me. There was a contradiction at work here. The early indications of evidence were that Vincent had known the person who killed him and allowed him to get close. But the man in the photograph appeared to be in disguise. Would Jerry have lowered his window for the man in the photograph? The fact that Bosch had zeroed in on this man didn’t make sense when applied to what was known about the crime scene.
The calls from the FBI to Vincent’s cell phone were also part of the unknown equation. What did the bureau know and why had no agent come forward to Bosch? It might be that the agency was hiding its tracks. But I also knew that it might not want to come out of the shadows to reveal an ongoing investigation. If this was the case, I would need to step more carefully than I had been. If I ended up the least bit tainted in a federal corruption probe, I would never recover from it.
The last unknown to consider was the murder itself. Vincent had paid the bribe and was ready for trial as scheduled. Why had he become a liability? His murder certainly threatened the timetable and was an extreme response. Why was he killed?
There were too many questions and too many unknowns for now. I needed more information before I could draw any solid conclusions about how to proceed. But there was a basic conclusion I couldn’t stop myself from reaching. It seemed uncomfortably clear that I was being mushroomed by my own client. Elliot was keeping me in the dark about the interior machinations of the case.
But that could work both ways. I decided that I would do exactly what Bosch had asked: keep the information the detective had given me confidential. I would not share it with my staff and certainly, at this point, I would not question Walter Elliot about his knowledge of these things. I would keep my head above the dark waters of the case and keep my eyes wide open.
I shifted focus from my thoughts to what was directly in front of me. I was looking at the gaping mouth of Patrick Henson’s fish.
The door opened and Lorna reentered the office to find me standing there staring at the tarpon.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Thinking.”
“Well, Cisco’s here and we’ve got to go. You have a busy court schedule today and I don’t want to make you late.”
“Then, let’s go. I’m starved.”
I followed her out but not before glancing back at the big beautiful fish hanging on the wall. I thought I knew exactly how he felt.
Twenty-three
I had Patrick drive us over to the Pacific Dining Car, and Cisco and I ordered steak and eggs while Lorna had tea and honey. The Dining Car was a place where downtown power brokers liked to gather before a day of fighting it out in the glass towers nearby. The food was overpriced but good. It instilled confidence, made the downtown warrior feel like a heavy hitter.
As soon as the waiter took our order and left us, Lorna put her silverware to the side and opened a spiral-bound At-A-Glance calendar on the table.
“Eat fast,” she said. “You have a busy day.”
“Tell me.”
“All right, the easy stuff first.”
She flipped a couple of pages back and forth in the calendar, then proceeded.
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br /> “You have a ten a.m. in chambers with Judge Holder. She wants an updated client inventory.”
“She told me I had a week,” I protested. “Today’s Thursday.”
“Yeah, well, Michaela called and said the judge wants an interim update. I think she—the judge, that is—saw in the paper that you are continuing on as Elliot’s lawyer. She’s afraid you’re spending all your time on Elliot and none on the other clients.”
“That’s not true. I filed a motion for Patrick yesterday and Tuesday I took the sentencing on Reese. I mean, I haven’t even met all the clients yet.”
“Don’t worry, I have a hard-copy inventory back at the office for you to take with you. It shows who you’ve met, who you signed up and calendars on all of them. Just hit her with the paperwork and she won’t be able to complain.”
I smiled. Lorna was the best case manager in the business.
“Great. What else?”
“Then at eleven you have an in-chambers with Judge Stanton on Elliot.”
“Status conference?”
“Yes. He wants to know if you are going to be able to go next Thursday.”
“No, but Elliot won’t have it any other way.”
“Well, the judge will get to hear Elliot say that for himself. He’s requiring the defendant’s presence.”
That was unusual. Most status conferences were routine and quick. The fact that Stanton wanted Elliot there bumped this one up into a more important realm.
I thought of something and pulled out my cell phone.
“Did you let Elliot know? He might—”
“Put it away. He knows and he’ll be there. I talked to his assistant—Mrs. Albrecht—this morning and she knows he has to show and that the judge can revoke if he doesn’t.”
I nodded. It was a smart move. Threaten Elliot’s freedom as a means of making sure he shows up.
“Good,” I said. “That it?”
I wanted to get to Cisco to ask what else he had been able to find out about the Vincent investigation and whether his sources had mentioned anything about the man in the surveillance photo Bosch had shown me.
“Not by a long shot, my friend,” Lorna responded. “Now we get to the mystery case.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“We got a call yesterday afternoon from Judge Friedman’s clerk, who called Vincent’s office blind to see if there was anyone there taking over the cases. When the clerk was informed that you were taking over, she asked if you were aware of the hearing scheduled before Friedman today at two. I checked our new calendar and you didn’t have a two o’clock on there for today. So there is the mystery. You have a hearing at two for a case we not only don’t have on calendar but don’t have a file for either.”
“What’s the client’s name?”
“Eli Wyms.”
It meant nothing to me.
“Did Wren know the name?”
Lorna shook her head in a dismissive way.
“Did you check the dead cases? Maybe it was just misfiled.”
“No, we checked. There is no file anywhere in the office.”
“And what’s the hearing? Did you ask the clerk?”
Lorna nodded.
“Pretrial motions. Wyms is charged with attempted murder of a peace officer and several other weapons-related charges. He was arrested May second at a county park in Calabasas. He was arraigned, bound over and sent out to Camarillo for ninety days. He must’ve been found competent because the hearing today is to set a trial date and consider bail.”
I nodded. From the shorthand, I could read between the lines. Wyms had gotten into some sort of confrontation involving weapons with the Sheriff’s Department, which provided law enforcement services in the unincorporated area known as Calabasas. He was sent to the state’s mental evaluation center in Camarillo, where the shrinks took three months deciding whether he was a crazy man or competent to stand trial on the charges against him. The docs determined he was competent, meaning he knew right from wrong when he tried to kill a peace officer, most likely the sheriff’s deputy who confronted him.
It was a bare-bones sketch of the trouble Eli Wyms was in. There would be more detail in the file but we had no file.
“Is there any reference to Wyms in the trust account deposits?” I asked.
Lorna shook her head. I should’ve assumed she would be thorough and check the bank accounts in search of Eli Wyms.
“Okay, so it looks like maybe Jerry took him on pro bono.”
Attorneys occasionally provide legal services free of charge—pro bono—to indigent or special clients. Sometimes this is an altruistic endeavor and sometimes it’s because the client just won’t pay up. Either way, the lack of an advance from Wyms was understandable. The missing file was another story.
“You know what I was thinking?” Lorna said.
“What?”
“That Jerry had the file with him—in his briefcase—when he left Monday night.”
“And it got taken, along with his laptop and cell phone, by the killer.”
She nodded and I nodded back.
It made sense. He was spending the evening preparing for the week and he had a hearing Thursday on Wyms. Maybe he had run out of gas and thrown the file in his briefcase to look at later. Or maybe he kept the file with him because it was important in a way I couldn’t see yet. Maybe the killer wanted the Wyms file and not the laptop or the cell phone.
“Who’s the prosecutor on the case?”
“Joanne Giorgetti, and I’m way ahead of you. I called her yesterday and explained our situation and asked if she wouldn’t mind copying the discovery again for us. She said no problem. You can pick it up after your eleven with Judge Stanton and then have a couple hours to familiarize yourself with it before the hearing at two.”
Joanne Giorgetti was a top-flight prosecutor who worked in the crimes-against-law-officers section of the DA’s Office. She was also a long-time friend of my ex-wife’s and was my daughter’s basketball coach in the YMCA league. She had always been cordial and collegial with me, even after Maggie and I split up. It didn’t surprise me that she would run off a copy of the discovery materials for me.
“You think of everything, Lorna,” I said. “Why don’t you just take over Vincent’s practice and run with it? You don’t need me.”
She smiled at the compliment and I saw her eyes flick in the direction of Cisco. The read I got was that she wanted him to realize her value to the law firm of Michael Haller and Associates.
“I like working in the background,” she said. “I’ll leave center stage for you.”
Our plates were served and I spread a liberal dose of Tabasco sauce on both my steak and the eggs. Sometimes hot sauce was the only way I knew I was still alive.
I was finally able to hear what Cisco had come up with on the Vincent investigation but he dug into his meal and I knew better than to try to keep him from his food. I decided to wait and asked Lorna how things were working out with Wren Williams. She answered in a low voice, as if Wren were sitting nearby in the restaurant and listening.
“She’s not a lot of help, Mickey. She seems to have no idea of how the office worked or where Jerry put things. She’d be lucky to remember where she parked her car this morning. If you ask me, she was working there for some other reason.”
I could have told her the reason—as it had been told to me by Bosch—but decided to keep it to myself. I didn’t want to distract Lorna with gossip.
I looked over and saw Cisco mopping up the steak juice and hot sauce on his plate with a piece of toast. He was good to go.
“What do you have going today, Cisco?”
“I’m working on Rilz and his side of the equation.”
“How’s that going?”
“I think there’ll be a couple things you can use. You want to hear about it?”
“Not yet. I’ll ask when I need it.”
I didn’t want to be given any information about Rilz that I might have to turn over
to the prosecution in discovery. At the moment, the less I knew, the better. Cisco understood this and nodded.
“I also have the Bruce Carlin debriefing this afternoon,” Cisco added.
“He wants two hundred an hour,” Lorna said. “Highway robbery, if you ask me.”
I waved off her protest.
“Just pay it. It’s a onetime expense and he probably has information we can use, and that might save Cisco some time.”
“Don’t worry, we’re paying him. I’m just not happy about it. He’s gouging us because he knows he can.”
“Technically, he’s gouging Elliot and I don’t think he’s going to care.”
I turned back to my investigator.
“You have anything new on the Vincent case?”
Cisco updated me with what he had. It consisted mostly of forensic details, suggesting that the source he had inside the investigation came from that side of the equation. He said Vincent had been shot twice, both times in the area of the left temple. The spread on the entry wounds was less than an inch, and powder burns on the skin and hair indicated the weapon was nine to twelve inches away when fired. Cisco said this indicated that the killer had fired two quick shots and was fairly skilled. It was unlikely that an amateur would fire twice quickly and be able to cluster the impacts.
Additionally, Cisco said, the slugs never left the body and were recovered during the autopsy conducted late the day before.
“They were twenty-fives,” he said.
I had handled countless cross-examinations of tool marks and ballistics experts. I knew my bullets and I knew a .25 caliber round came out of a small weapon but could do great damage, especially if fired into the cranial vault. The slugs would ricochet around inside. It would be like putting the victim’s brain in a blender.
“They know the exact weapon yet?”
I knew that by studying the markings—lands and grooves—on the slugs they would be able to tell what kind of gun fired the rounds. Just as with the Malibu murders, in which the investigators knew what gun had been used, even though they didn’t have it.
The Brass Verdict Page 16