“A lot of these new people just don’t get it. They don’t see it as a calling. To them it’s not about justice. It’s just a game — a batting average. They like to keep score and to see how far it will get them in the office. In fact, they’re all just like junior Smithsons.”
A calling. It was her sense of calling that ultimately cost us our marriage. On an intellectual level she could deal with being married to a man who worked the other side of the aisle. But when it came down to the reality of what we did, we were lucky to have lasted the eight years we had managed. Honey, how was your day? Oh, I got a guy who murdered his roommate with an ice pick a seven-year deal. And you? Oh, I put a guy away for five years because he stole a car stereo to feed his habit . . . It just didn’t work. Four years in, a daughter arrived, but through no fault of her own, she only kept us going another four years.
Still, I didn’t regret a thing about it. I cherished my daughter. She was the only thing that was really good about my life, that I could be proud of. I think deep down, the reason I didn’t see her enough — that I was chasing cases instead of her — was because I felt unworthy of her. Her mother was a hero. She put bad people in jail. What could I tell her was good and holy about what I did, when I had long ago lost the thread of it myself?
“Hey, Haller, are you there?”
“Yeah, Mags, I’m here. What are you eating today?”
“Just the oriental salad from downstairs. Nothing special. Where are you?”
“Heading downtown. Listen, tell Hayley I’ll see her this Saturday. I’ll make a plan. We’ll do something special.”
“You really mean that? I don’t want to get her hopes up.”
I felt something lift inside me, the idea that my daughter would get her hopes up about seeing me. The one thing Maggie never did was run me down with Hayley. She wasn’t the kind that would do that. I always admired that.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said.
“Great, I’ll tell her. Let me know when you’re coming or if I can drop her off.”
“Okay.”
I hesitated. I wanted to talk to her longer but there was nothing else to say. I finally said good-bye and closed the phone. In a few minutes we broke free of the bottleneck. I looked out the window and saw no accident. I saw nobody with a flat tire and no highway patrol cruiser parked on the shoulder. I saw nothing that explained what had caused the traffic tie-up. It was often like that. Freeway traffic in Los Angeles was as mysterious as marriage. It moved and flowed, then stalled and stopped for no easily explainable reason.
I am from a family of attorneys. My father, my half brother, a niece and a nephew. My father was a famous lawyer in a time when there was no cable television and no Court TV. He was the dean of criminal law in L.A. for almost three decades. From Mickey Cohen to the Manson girls, his clients always made the headlines. I was just an afterthought in his life, a surprise visitor to his second marriage to a B-level movie actress known for her exotic Latin looks but not her acting skills. The mix gave me my black Irish looks. My father was old when I came, so he was gone before I was old enough to really know him or talk to him about the calling of the law. He only left me his name. Mickey Haller, the legal legend. It still opened doors.
But my older brother — the half brother from the first marriage — told me that my father used to talk to him about the practice of law and criminal defense. He used to say he would defend the devil himself just as long as he could cover the fee. The only big-time case and client he ever turned down was Sirhan Sirhan. He told my brother that he had liked Bobby Kennedy too much to defend his killer, no matter how much he believed in the ideal that the accused deserved the best and most vigorous defense possible.
Growing up I read all the books about my father and his cases. I admired the skill and vigor and strategies he brought to the defense table. He was damn good and it made me proud to carry his name. But the law was different now. It was grayer. Ideals had long been downgraded to notions. Notions were optional.
My cell phone rang and I checked the screen before answering.
“What’s up, Val?”
“We’re getting him out. They already took him back to the jail and we’re processing him out now.”
“Dobbs went with the bond?”
“You got it.”
I could hear the delight in his voice.
“Don’t be so giddy. You sure he’s not a runner?”
“I’m never sure. I’m going to make him wear a bracelet. I lose him, I lose my house.”
I realized that what I had taken as delight at the windfall that a million-dollar bond would bring to Valenzuela was actually nervous energy. Valenzuela would be taut as a wire until this one was over, one way or the other. Even if the court had not ordered it, Valenzuela was going to put an electronic tracking bracelet on Roulet’s ankle. He was taking no chances with this guy.
“Where’s Dobbs?”
“Back at my office, waiting. I’ll bring Roulet over as soon as he’s out. Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“Is Maisy over there?”
“Yeah, she’s there.”
“Okay, I’m going to call over.”
I ended the call and hit the speed-dial combo for Liberty Bail Bonds. Valenzuela’s receptionist and assistant answered.
“Maisy, it’s Mick. Can you put Mr. Dobbs on the line?”
“Sure thing, Mick.”
A few seconds later Dobbs got on the line. He seemed put out by something. Just in the way he said, “This is Cecil Dobbs.”
“This is Mickey Haller. How is it going over there?”
“Well, if you consider I am letting my duties to other clients slide while I sit here and read year-old magazines, not good.”
“You don’t carry a cell phone to do business?”
“I do. But that’s not the point. My clients aren’t cell phone people. They’re face-to-face people.”
“I see. Well, the good news is, I hear our boy is about to be released.”
“Our boy?”
“Mr. Roulet. Valenzuela should have him out inside the hour. I am about to go into a client conference, but as I said before, I am free in the afternoon. Do you want to meet to go over the case with our mutual client or do you want me to take it from here?”
“No, Mrs. Windsor has insisted that I monitor this closely. In fact, she may choose to be there as well.”
“I don’t mind the meet-and-greet with Mrs. Windsor, but when it comes down to talking about the case, it’s just going to be the defense team. That can include you but not the mother. Okay?”
“I understand. Let’s say four o’clock at my office. I will have Louis there.”
“I’ll be there.”
“My firm employs a crack investigator. I’ll ask him to join us.”
“That won’t be necessary, Cecil. I have my own and he’s already on the job. We’ll see you at four.”
I ended the call before Dobbs could start a debate about which investigator to use. I had to be careful that Dobbs didn’t control the investigation, preparation and strategy of the case. Monitoring was one thing. But I was Louis Roulet’s attorney now. Not him.
When I called Raul Levin next, he told me he was already on his way to the LAPD Van Nuys Division to pick up a copy of the arrest report.
“Just like that?” I asked.
“No, not just like that. In a way, you could say it took me twenty years to get this report.”
I understood. Levin’s connections, procured over time and experience, traded over trust and favors, had come through for him. No wonder he charged five hundred dollars a day when he could get it. I told him about the meeting at four and he said he would be there and would be ready to furnish us with the law enforcement view of the case.
The Lincoln pulled to a stop when I closed the phone. We were in front of the Twin Towers jail facility. It wasn’t even ten years old but the smog was beginning to permanently stain its sand-colored walls a dreary gray. It was a sad and fo
rbidding place that I spent too much time in. I opened the car door and got out to go inside once again.
SEVEN
There was an attorney’s check-in window that allowed me to bypass the long line of visitors waiting to get in to see loved ones incarcerated in one of the towers. When I told the window deputy whom I wanted to see, he tapped the name into the computer and never said anything about Gloria Dayton being in medical and unavailable. He printed out a visitor’s pass which he slid into the plastic frame of a clip-on badge and told me to put it on and wear it at all times in the jail. He then told me to step away from the window and wait for an attorney escort.
“It will be a few minutes,” he said.
I knew from prior experience that my cell phone did not get a signal inside the jail and that if I stepped outside to use it, I might miss my escort and then have to go through the whole sign-in process again. So I stayed put and watched the faces of the people who came to visit those being held inside. Most were black and brown. Most had the look of routine on their faces. They all probably knew the ropes here much better than I.
After twenty minutes a large woman in a deputy’s uniform came into the waiting area and collected me. I knew that she had not gotten into the sheriff’s department with her current dimensions. She was at least a hundred pounds overweight and seemed to struggle just to carry it while walking. But I also knew that once somebody was in, it was hard to get them out. About the best this one could do if there was a jail break was lean up against a door to keep it closed.
“Sorry it took so long,” she told me as we waited between the double steel doors of a mantrap in the women’s tower. “I had to go find her, make sure we still had her.”
She signaled that everything was all right to a camera above the next door and its lock clacked open. She pushed through.
“She was up in medical getting fixed up,” she said.
“Fixed up?”
I wasn’t aware of the jail having a drug-treatment program that included “fixing up” addicts.
“Yeah, she got hurt,” the deputy said. “Got a little banged up in a scuffle. She can tell you.”
I let the questions go at that. In a way, I was relieved that the medical delay was not due — not directly, at least — to drug ingestion or addiction.
The deputy led me to the attorney room, which I had been in many times before with many different clients. The vast majority of my clients were men and I didn’t discriminate, but the truth was I hated representing women who were incarcerated. From prostitutes to murderers — and I had defended them all — there was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions or that some of them did not deserve the punishments they received. There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.
The visiting area was a row of booths in which an attorney could sit on one side and confer with a client who sat on the other side, separated by an eighteen-inch sheet of clear Plexiglas. A deputy sat in a glassed-in booth at the end of the room and observed but supposedly didn’t listen. If paperwork needed to be passed to the client, it was held up for the booth deputy to see and approve.
I was led to a booth and my escort left me. I then waited another ten minutes before the same deputy appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas with Gloria Dayton. Immediately, I saw that my client had a swelling around her left eye and a single butterfly stitch over a small laceration just below her widow’s peak. Gloria Dayton had jet-black hair and olive skin. She had once been beautiful. The first time I represented her, seven or eight years before, she was beautiful. The kind of beauty that leaves you stunned at the fact she was selling it, that she had decided that selling herself to strangers was her best or only option. Now she just looked hard to me. The lines of her face were taut. She had visited surgeons who were not the best, and anyway, there was nothing they could do about eyes that had seen too much.
“Mickey Mantle,” she said. “You’re going to bat for me again?”
She said it in her little girl’s voice that I suppose her regular clients enjoyed and responded to. It just sounded strange to me, coming from that tightly drawn mouth and face with eyes that were as hard and had as much life in them as marbles.
She always called me Mickey Mantle, even though she was born after the great slugger had long retired and probably knew little about him or the game he played. It was just a name to her. I guess the alternative would have been to call me Mickey Mouse, and I probably wouldn’t have liked it much.
“I’m going to try, Gloria,” I told her. “What happened to your face? How’d you get hurt?”
She made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
“There was a little disagreement with some of the girls in my dorm.”
“About what?”
“Just girl stuff.”
“Are you getting high in there?”
She looked indignant and then she tried putting a pouting look on her face.
“No, I’m not.”
I studied her. She seemed straight. Maybe she wasn’t getting high and that was not what the fight had been about.
“I don’t want to stay in here, Mickey,” she said in her real voice.
“I don’t blame you. I don’t like being in here myself and I get to leave.”
I immediately regretted saying the last part and reminding her of her situation. She didn’t seem to notice.
“You think maybe you could get me into one of those pretrial whatchamacallits where I can get myself right?”
I thought it was interesting how addicts call both getting high and getting sober the same thing — getting right.
“The problem is, Gloria, we got into a pretrial intervention program last time, remember? And it obviously didn’t work. So this time I don’t know. They only have so many spaces in those things and the judges and prosecutors don’t like sending people back when they didn’t take advantage of it in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” she protested. “I took advantage. I went the whole damn time.”
“That’s right. That was good. But then after it was over, you went right back to doing what you do and here we are again. They wouldn’t call that a success, Gloria. I have to be honest with you. I don’t think I can get you into a program this time. I think you have to be ready for them to be tougher this time.”
Her eyes drooped.
“I can’t do it,” she said in a small voice.
“Look, they have programs in the jail. You’ll get straight and come out with another chance to start again clean.”
She shook her head; she looked lost.
“You’ve had a long run but it can’t go on,” I said. “If I were you I’d think about getting out of this place. L.A., I mean. Go somewhere and start again.”
She looked up at me with anger in her eyes.
“Start over and do what? Look at me. What am I going to do? Get married, have kids and plant flowers?”
I didn’t have an answer and neither did she.
“Let’s talk about that when the time comes. For now, let’s worry about your case. Tell me what happened.”
“What always happens. I screened the guy and it all checked out. He looked legit. But he was a cop and that was that.”
“You went to him?”
She nodded.
“The Mondrian. He had a suite — that’s another thing. The cops usually don’t have suites. They don’t have the budget.”
“Didn’t I tell you how stupid it would be to take coke with you when you work? And if a guy even asks you to bring coke with you, then you know he’s a cop.”
“
I know all of that and he didn’t ask me to bring it. I forgot I had it, okay? I got it from a guy I went to see right before him. What was I supposed to do, leave it in the car for the Mondrian valets to take?”
“What guy did you get it from?”
“A guy at the Travelodge on Santa Monica. I did him earlier and he offered it to me, you know, instead of cash. Then after I left I checked my messages and I had the call from the guy at the Mondrian. So I called him back, set it up and went straight there. I forgot I had the stuff in my purse.”
Nodding, I leaned forward. I was seeing a glimmer on this one, a possibility.
“This guy in the Travelodge, who was he?”
“I don’t know, just some guy who saw my ad on the site.”
She arranged her liaisons through a website which carried photos, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of escorts.
“Did he say where he was from?”
“No. He was Mexican or Cuban or something. He was sweaty from using.”
“When he gave you the coke, did you see if he had any more?”
“Yeah, he had some. I was hoping for a call back . . . but I don’t think I was what he was expecting.”
Last time I had checked her ad on LA-Darlings.com to see if she was still in the life, the photos she’d put up were at least five years old and looked ten. I imagined that it could lead to some disappointment when her clients opened their hotel room doors.
“How much did he have?”
“I don’t know I just knew he had to have more because if it was all he had left, he wouldn’t have given it to me.”
It was a good point. The glimmer was getting brighter.
“Did you screen him?”
“’Course.”
“What, his driver’s license?”
“No, his passport. He said he didn’t have a license.”
“What was his name?”
“Hector something.”
“Come on, Gloria, Hector what? Try to re — ”
“Hector something Moya. It was three names. But I remember ‘Moya’ because I said ‘Hector give me Moya’ when he brought out the coke.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
The Lincoln Lawyer Collection Page 6