THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2005)

by Michael Connelly

  "Well, that's the state's case, Louis. A bunch of spinning plates. And every one of those plates is an individual piece of evidence against you. My job is to take each plate, stop it from spinning and knock it to the ground so hard that it shatters and can't be used anymore. If the blue plate contains the victim's blood on your hands, then I need to find a way to knock it down. If the yellow plate has a knife with your bloody fingerprints on it, then once again I need to knock that sucker down. Neutralize it. You follow?"

  "Yes, I follow. I -"

  "Now, in the middle of this field of plates is a big one. It's a fucking platter, Louis, and if that baby falls over it's going to take everything down with it. Every plate. The whole case goes down. Do you know what that platter is, Louis?"

  He shook his head no.

  "That big platter is the victim, the chief witness against you. If we can knock that platter over, then the whole act is over and the crowd moves on."

  I waited a moment to see if he would react. He said nothing.

  "Louis, for almost two weeks you have concealed from me the method by which I could knock the big platter down. It asks the question why. Why would a guy with money at his disposal, a Rolex watch on his wrist, a Porsche out in the parking lot and a Holmby Hills address need to use a knife to get sex from a woman who sells it anyway? When you boil it all down to that question, the case starts to collapse, Louis, because the answer is simple. He wouldn't. Common sense says he wouldn't. And when you come to that conclusion, all the plates stop spinning. You see the setup, you see the trap, and now it's the defendant who starts to look like the victim."

  I looked at him. He nodded.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "You should be," I said. "The case would have started coming apart almost two weeks ago and we probably wouldn't be sitting here right now if you had been up-front with me from the start."

  In that moment I realized where my anger was truly coming from and it wasn't because Roulet had been late or had lied or because of Sam Scales calling me a street-legal con. It was because I saw the franchise slipping away. There would be no trial in this case, no six-figure fee. I'd be lucky just to keep the retainer I'd gotten at the start. The case was going to end today when I walked into the DA's office and told Ted Minton what I knew and what I had.

  "I'm sorry," Roulet said again in a whiny voice. "I didn't mean to mess things up."

  I was looking down at the ground between my feet now. Without looking at him I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.

  "I'm sorry I yelled at you before, Louis."

  "What do we do now?"

  "I have a few more questions to ask you about that night, and then I'm going to go up into that building over there and meet the prosecutor and knock down all his plates. I think that by the time I come out of there this may all be over and you'll be free to go back to showing your mansions to rich people."

  "Just like that?"

  "Well, formally he may want to go into court and ask a judge to dismiss the case."

  Roulet opened his mouth in shock.

  "Mr. Haller, I can't begin to tell you how -"

  "You can call me Mickey. Sorry about that before."

  "No problem. Thank you. What questions do you want to ask?"

  I thought for a moment. I really didn't need anything else to go into the meeting with Minton. I was locked and loaded. I had walking proof.

  "What did the note say?" I asked.

  "What note?"

  "The one she gave you at the bar in Morgan's."

  "Oh, it said her address and then underneath she wrote 'four hundred dollars' and then under that she wrote 'Come after ten.'"

  "Too bad we don't have that. But I think we have enough."

  I nodded and looked at my watch. I still had fifteen minutes until the meeting but I was finished with Roulet.

  "You can go now, Louis. I'll call you when it's all over."

  "You sure? I could wait out here if you want."

  "I don't know how long it will take. I'm going to have to lay it all out for him. He'll probably have to take it to his boss. It could be a while."

  "All right, well, I guess I'll go then. But you'll call me, right?"

  "Yes, I will. We'll probably go in to see the judge Monday or Tuesday, then it will all be over."

  He put his hand out and I shook it.

  "Thanks, Mick. You're the best. I knew I had the best lawyer when I got you."

  I watched him walk back across the plaza and go between the two courthouses toward the public parking garage.

  "Yeah, I'm the best," I said to myself.

  I felt the presence of someone and turned to see a man sit down on the bench next to me. He turned and looked at me and we recognized each other at the same time. It was Howard Kurlen, a homicide detective from the Van Nuys Division. We had bumped up against each other on a few cases over the years.

  "Well, well, well," Kurlen said. "The pride of the California bar. You're not talking to yourself, are you?"

  "Maybe."

  "That could be bad for a lawyer if that got around."

  "I'm not worried. How are you doing, Detective?"

  Kurlen was unwrapping a sandwich he had taken out of a brown bag.

  "Busy day. Late lunch."

  He produced a peanut butter sandwich from the wrap. There was a layer of something else besides peanut butter in it but it wasn't jelly. I couldn't identify it. I looked at my watch. I still had a few minutes before I needed to get in line for the metal detectors at the courthouse entrance but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend them with Kurlen and his horrible-looking sandwich. I thought about bringing up the Blake verdict, sticking it to the LAPD a little bit, but Kurlen stuck one in me first.

  "How's my man Jesus doin'?" the detective asked.

  Kurlen had been lead detective on the Jesus Menendez case. He had wrapped him up so tightly that Menendez had no choice but to plead and hope for the best. He still got life.

  "I don't know," I answered. "I don't talk to Jesus anymore."

  "Yeah, I guess once they plead out and go upstate they're not much use to you. No appeal work, no nothing."

  I nodded. Every cop had a jaundiced eye when it came to defense lawyers. It was as if they believed their own actions and investigations were beyond questioning or reproach. They didn't believe in a justice system based on checks and balances.

  "Just like you, I guess," I said. "On to the next one. I hope your busy day means you're working on getting me a new client."

  "I don't look at it that way. But I was wondering, do you sleep well at night?"

  "You know what I was wondering? What the hell is in that sandwich?"

  He held what was left of the sandwich up on display.

  "Peanut butter and sardines. Lots of good protein to get me through another day of chasing scumbags. Talking to them, too. You didn't answer my question."

  "I sleep fine, Detective. You know why? Because I play an important part in the system. A needed part-just like your part. When somebody is accused of a crime, they have the opportunity to test the system. If they want to do that, they come to me. That's all any of this is about. When you understand that, you have no trouble sleeping."

  "Good story. When you close your eyes I hope you believe it."

  "How about you, Detective? You ever put your head on the pillow and wonder whether you've put innocent people away?"

  "Nope," he said quickly, his mouth full of sandwich. "Never happened, never will."

  "Must be nice to be so sure."

  "A guy told me once that when you get to the end of your road, you have to look at the community woodpile and decide if you added to it while you were here or whether you just took from it. Well, I add to the woodpile, Haller. I sleep good at night. But I wonder about you and your kind. You lawyers are all takers from the woodpile."

  "Thanks for the sermon. I'll keep it in mind next time I'm chopping wood."

  "You don't like that, then I've got a joke f
or you. What's the difference between a catfish and a defense attorney?"

  "Hmmm, I don't know, Detective."

  "One's a bottom-feeding scum sucker and one's a fish."

  He laughed uproariously. I stood up. It was time to go.

  "I hope you brush your teeth after you eat something like that," I said. "I'd hate to be your partner if you don't."

  I walked away, thinking about what he had said about the woodpile and what Sam Scales had said about my being a street-legal con. I was getting it from all sides today.

  "Thanks for the tip," Kurlen called after me.

  FOURTEEN

  Ted Minton had arranged for us to discuss the Roulet case in private by scheduling our conference at a time he knew the deputy district attorney he shared space with had a hearing in court. Minton met me in the waiting area and walked me back. He did not look to me to be older than thirty but he had a self-assured presence. I probably had ten years and a hundred trials on him, yet he showed no sign of deference or respect. He acted as though the meeting was a nuisance he had to put up with. That was fine. That was the usual. And it put more fuel in my tank.

  When we got to his small, windowless office, he offered me his office partner's seat and closed the door. We sat down and looked at each other. I let him go first.

  "Okay," he said. "First off, I wanted to meet you. I'm sort of new up here in the Valley and haven't met a lot of the members of the defense bar. I know you're one of those guys that covers the whole county but we haven't run across each other before."

  "Maybe that's because you haven't worked many felony trials before."

  He smiled and nodded like I had scored a point of some kind.

  "That might be true," he said. "Anyway, I gotta tell you, when I was in law school at SC I read a book about your father and his cases. I think it was calledHaller for the Defense . Something like that. Interesting guy and interesting times."

  I nodded back.

  "He was gone before I really knew him, but there were a few books about him and I read them all more than a few times. It's probably why I ended up doing this."

  "That must have been hard, getting to know your father through books."

  I shrugged. I didn't think that Minton and I needed to know each other that well, particularly in light of what I was about to do to him.

  "I guess it happens," he said.

  "Yeah."

  He clapped his hands together once, a let's-get-down-to-business gesture.

  "Okay, so we're here to talk about Louis Roulet, aren't we?"

  "It's pronounced Roo-lay."

  "Roooo-lay.Got it. So, let's see, I have some things for you here."

  He swiveled his seat to turn back to his desk. He picked up a thin file and turned back to hand it to me.

  "I want to play fair. That's the up-to-the-minute discovery for you. I know I don't have to give it to you until after the arraignment but, hell, let's be cordial."

  My experience is that when prosecutors tell you they are playing fair or better than fair, then you better watch your back. I fanned through the discovery file but didn't really read anything. The file Levin had gathered for me was at least four times as thick. I wasn't thrilled because Minton had so little. I was suspicious that he was holding back on me. Most prosecutors made you work for the discovery by having to demand it repeatedly, to the point of going to court to complain to the judge about it. But Minton had just casually handed at least some of it over. Either he had more to learn than I imagined about felony prosecutions or there was some sort of play here.

  "This is everything?" I asked.

  "Everything I've gotten."

  That was always the way. If the prosecutor didn't have it, then he could stall its release to the defense. I knew for a fact-as in having been married to a prosecutor-that it was not out of the ordinary for a prosecutor to tell the police investigators on a case to take their time getting all the paperwork in. They could then turn around and tell the defense lawyer they wanted to play fair and hand over practically nothing. The rules of discovery were often referred to by defense pros as the rules of dishonesty. This of course went both ways. Discovery was supposed to be a two-way street.

  "And you're going to trial with this?"

  I waved the file as if to say its thin contents were as thin as the case.

  "I'm not worried about it. But if you want to talk about a disposition, I'll listen."

  "No, no disposition on this. We're going balls out. We're going to waive the prelim and go right to trial. No delays."

  "He won't waive speedy?"

  "Nope. You've got sixty days from Monday to put up or shut up."

  Minton pursed his lips as though what I had just told him were only a minor inconvenience and surprise. It was a good cover-up. I knew I had landed a solid punch.

  "Well, then, I guess we ought to talk about unilateral discovery. What do you have for me?"

  He had dropped the pleasant tone.

  "I'm still putting it together," I said. "But I'll have it at the arraignment Monday. But most of what I've got is probably already in this file you gave me, don't you think?"

  "Most likely."

  "You have that the supposed victim is a prostitute who had solicited my client in here, right? And that she has continued that line of work since the alleged incident, right?"

  Minton's mouth opened maybe a half inch and then closed, but it was a good tell. I had hit him with another solid shot. But then he recovered quickly.

  "As a matter of fact," he said, "I am aware of her occupation. But what surprises me is that you know this already. I hope you aren't sniffing around my victim, Mr. Haller?"

  "Call me Mickey. And what I am doing is the least of your problems. You better take a good look at this case, Ted. I know you're new to felony trials and you don't want to come out of the box with a loser like this. Especially after the Blake fiasco. But this one's a dog and it's going to bite you on the ass."

  "Really? How so?"

  I looked past his shoulder at the computer on his desk.

  "Does that thing play DVDs?"

  Minton looked back at the computer. It looked ancient.

  "It should. What have you got?"

  I realized that showing him the surveillance video from the bar at Morgan's would be giving an early reveal of the biggest ace that I held, but I was confident that once he saw it, there would be no arraignment Monday and no case. My job was to neutralize the case and get my client out from under the government's weight. This was the way to do it.

  "I don't have all my discovery together but I do have this," I said.

  I handed Minton the DVD I had gotten earlier from Levin. The prosecutor put it into his computer.

  "This is from the bar at Morgan's," I told him as he tried to get it playing. "Your guys never went there but my guy did. This is the Sunday night of the supposed attack."

  "And this could have been doctored."

  "It could have been but it wasn't. You can have it checked. My investigator has the original and I will tell him to make it available after the arraignment."

  After a short struggle Minton got the DVD to play. He watched silently as I pointed out the time code and all the same details Levin had pointed out to me, including Mr. X and his left-handedness. Minton fast-forwarded as I instructed and then slowed it to watch the moment when Reggie Campo approached my client at the bar. He had a frown of concentration on his face. When it was over he ejected the disc and held it up.

  "Can I keep this until I get the original?"

  "Be my guest."

  Minton put the disc back in its case and placed it on top of a stack of files on his desk.

  "Okay, what else?" he asked.

  Now my mouth let some light in.

  "What do you mean, what else? Isn't that enough?"

  "Enough for what?"

  "Look, Ted, why don't we cut the bullshit?"

  "Please do."

  "What are we talking about here? That disc b
lows this case out of the water. Let's forget about arraignment and trial and talk about going into court next week with a joint motion to dismiss. I want this shit-canned with prejudice, Ted. No coming back at my guy if somebody in here decides to change their mind."

  Minton smiled and shook his head.

  "Can't do that, Mickey. This woman was injured quite badly. She was victimized by an animal and I'm not going to dismiss anything against -"