The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  I had sent Wren Williams home early. She had been unable to stop crying or objecting to my taking control of her dead boss’s cases. I decided to remove the barricade rather than have to keep walking around it. The last thing she asked before I escorted her through the door was whether I was going to fire her. I told her the jury was still out on that question but that she should report for work as usual the next day.

  With Jerry Vincent dead and Wren Williams gone, we’d been left stumbling around in the dark until Lorna figured out the filing system and started pulling the active case files. From calendar notations in each file, she’d been able to start to put together a master calendar—the key component in any trial lawyer’s professional life. Once we had worked up a rudimentary calendar, I began to breathe a little easier and we’d broken for lunch and opened the sandwich cartons Lorna had brought from Dusty’s.

  The calendar was light. A few case hearings here and there but for the most part it was obvious that Vincent was keeping things clear in advance of the Walter Elliot trial, which was scheduled to begin with jury selection in nine days.

  “So let’s start,” I said, my mouth still full with my last bite. “According to the calendar we’ve pieced together, I’ve got a sentencing in forty-five minutes. So I was thinking we could have a preliminary discussion now, and then I could leave you two here while I go to court. Then I’ll come back and see how much farther we’ve gotten before Cisco and I go out and start knocking on doors.”

  They both nodded, their mouths still working on their sandwiches as well. Cisco had cranberry in his mustache but didn’t know it.

  Lorna was as neat and as beautiful as ever. She was a stunner with blonde hair and eyes that somehow made you think you were the center of the universe when she was looking at you. I never got tired of that. I had kept her on salary the whole year I was out. I could afford it with the insurance settlement and I didn’t want to run the risk that she’d be working for another lawyer when it was time for me to come back to work.

  “Let’s start with the money,” I said.

  Lorna nodded. As soon as she had gotten the active files together and placed them in front of me, she had moved on to the bank books, perhaps the only thing as important as the case calendar. The bank books would tell us more than just how much money Vincent’s firm had in its coffers. They would give us an insight into how he ran his one-man shop.

  “All right, good and bad news on the money,” she said. “He’s got thirty-eight thousand in the operating account and a hundred twenty-nine thousand in the trust account.”

  I whistled. That was a lot of cash to keep in the trust account. Money taken in from clients goes into the trust account. As work for each client proceeds, the trust account is billed and the money transferred to the operating account. I always want more money in the operating account than in the trust account, because once it’s moved into the operating account, the money’s mine.

  “There’s a reason why it’s so lopsided,” Lorna said, picking up on my surprise. “He just took in a check for a hundred thousand dollars from Walter Elliot. He deposited it Friday.”

  I nodded and tapped the makeshift calendar I had on the table in front of me. It was drawn on a legal pad. Lorna would have to go out and buy a real calendar when she got the chance. She would also input all of the court appointments on my computer and on an online calendar. Lastly, and as Jerry Vincent had not done, she would back it all up on an off-site data-storage account.

  “The Elliot trial is scheduled to start Thursday next week,” I said. “He took the hundred up front.”

  Saying the obvious prompted a sudden realization.

  “As soon as we’re done here, call the bank,” I told Lorna. “See if the check has cleared. If not, try to push it through. As soon as Elliot hears that Vincent’s dead, he’ll probably try to put a stop-payment on it.”

  “Got it.”

  “What else on the money? If a hundred of it’s from Elliot, who’s the rest for?”

  Lorna opened one of the accounting books she had on her lap. Each dollar in a trust fund must be accounted for with regard to which client it is being held for. At any time, an attorney must be able to determine how much of a client’s advance has been transferred to the operating fund and used and how much is still on reserve in trust. A hundred thousand of Vincent’s trust account was earmarked for the Walter Elliot trial. That left only twenty-nine thousand received for the rest of the active cases. That wasn’t a lot, considering the stack of files we had pulled together while going through the filing cabinets looking for live cases.

  “That’s the bad news,” Lorna said. “It looks like there are only five or six other cases with trust deposits. With the rest of the active cases, the money’s already been moved into operating or been spent or the clients owe the firm.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t good news. It was beginning to look like Jerry Vincent was running ahead of his cases, meaning he’d been on a treadmill, bringing in new cases to keep money flowing and paying for existing cases. Walter Elliot must have been the get-well client. As soon as his hundred thousand cleared, Vincent would have been able to turn the treadmill off and catch his breath—for a while, at least. But he never got the chance.

  “How many clients with payment plans?” I asked.

  Lorna once again referred to the records on her lap.

  “He’s got two on pretrial payments. Both are well behind.”

  “What are the names?”

  It took her a moment to answer as she looked through the records.

  “Uh, Samuels is one and Henson is the other. They’re both about five thousand behind.”

  “And that’s why we take credit cards and don’t put out paper.”

  I was talking about my own business routine. I had long ago stopped providing credit services. I took nonrefundable cash payments. I also took plastic, but not until Lorna had run the card and gotten purchase approval.

  I looked down at the notes I had kept while conducting a quick review of the calendar and the active files. Both Samuels and Henson were on a sub list I had drawn up while reviewing the actives. It was a list of cases I was going to cut loose if I could. This was based on my quick review of the charges and facts of the cases. If there was something I didn’t like about a case—for any reason—then it went on the sub list.

  “No problem,” I said. “We’ll cut ’em loose.”

  Samuels was a manslaughter DUI case and Henson was a felony grand theft and drug possession. Henson momentarily held my interest because Vincent was going to build a defense around the client’s addiction to prescription painkillers. He was going to roll sympathy and deflection defenses into one. He would lay out a case in which the doctor who overprescribed the drugs to Henson was the one most responsible for the consequences of the addiction he created. Patrick Henson, Vincent would argue, was a victim, not a criminal.

  I was intimately familiar with this defense because I had employed it repeatedly over the past two years to try to absolve myself of the many infractions I had committed in my roles as father, ex-husband and friend to people in my life. But I put Henson into what I called the dog pile because I knew at heart the defense didn’t hold up—at least not for me. And I wasn’t ready to go into court with it for him either.

  Lorna nodded and made notes about the two cases on a pad of paper.

  “So what is the score on that?” she asked. “How many cases are you putting in the dog pile?”

  “We came up with thirty-one active cases,” I said. “Of those, I’m thinking only seven look like dogs. So that means we’ve got a lot of cases where there’s no money in the till. I’ll either have to get new money or they’ll go in the dog pile, too.”

  I wasn’t worried about having to go and get money out of the clients. Skill number one in criminal defense is getting the money. I was good at it and Lorna was even better. It was getting paying clients in the first place that was the trick, and we’d just had two dozen of them d
ropped into our laps.

  “You think the judge is just going to let you drop some of these?” she asked.

  “Nope. But I’ll figure something out on that. Maybe I could claim conflict of interest. The conflict being that I like to be paid for my work and the clients don’t like to pay.”

  No one laughed. No one even cracked a smile. I moved on.

  “Anything else on the money?” I asked.

  Lorna shook her head.

  “That’s about it. When you’re in court, I’m going to call the bank and get that started. You want us both to be signers on the accounts?”

  “Yeah, just like with my accounts.”

  I hadn’t considered the potential difficulty of getting my hands on the money that was in the Vincent accounts. That was what I had Lorna for. She was good on the business end in ways I wasn’t. Some days she was so good I wished we had either never gotten married or never gotten divorced.

  “See if Wren Williams can sign checks,” I said. “If she’s on there, take her off. For now I want just you and me on the accounts.”

  “Will do. You may have to go back to Judge Holder for a court order for the bank.”

  “That’ll be no problem.”

  My watch said I had ten minutes before I had to get going to court. I turned my attention to Wojciechowski.

  “Cisco, whaddaya got?”

  I had told him earlier to work his contacts and to monitor the investigation of Vincent’s murder as closely as possible. I wanted to know what moves the detectives were making because it appeared from what Bosch had said that the investigation was going to be entwined with the cases I had just inherited.

  “Not much,” Cisco said. “The detectives haven’t even gotten back to Parker Center yet. I called a guy I know in forensics and they’re still processing everything. Not a lot of info on what they do have but he told me about something they don’t. Vincent was shot at least two times that they could tell at the scene. And there were no shells. The shooter cleaned up.”

  There was something telling in that. The killer had either used a revolver or had had the presence of mind after killing a man to pick up the bullet casings ejected from his gun.

  Cisco continued his report.

  “I called another contact in communications and she told me the first call came in at twelve forty-three. They’ll narrow down time of death at autopsy.”

  “Is there a general idea of what happened?”

  “It looks like Vincent worked late, which was apparently his routine on Mondays. He worked late every Monday, preparing for the week ahead. When he was finished he packed his briefcase, locked up and left. He goes to the garage, gets in his car and gets popped through the driver’s side window. When they found him the car was in park, the ignition on. The window was down. It was in the low sixties last night. He could’ve put the window down because he liked the chill, or he could’ve lowered it for somebody coming to the car.”

  “Somebody he knew.”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  I thought about this and what Detective Bosch had said.

  “Nobody was working in the garage?”

  “No, the attendant leaves at six. You have to put your money in the machine after that or use your monthly pass. Vincent had a monthly.”

  “Cameras?”

  “Only cameras are where you drive in and out. They’re license plate cameras so if somebody says they lost their ticket they can tell when the car went in, that sort of thing. But from what I hear from my guy in forensics, there was nothing on tape that was useful. The killer didn’t drive into the garage. He walked in either through the building or through one of the pedestrian entrances.”

  “Who found Jerry?”

  “The security guard. They got one guard for the building and the garage. He hits the garage a couple times a night and noticed Vincent’s car on his second sweep. The lights were on and it was running, so he checked it out. He thought Vincent was sleeping at first, then he saw the blood.”

  I nodded, thinking about the scenario and how it had gone down. The killer was either incredibly careless and lucky or he knew the garage had no cameras and he would be able to intercept Jerry Vincent there on a Monday night when the space was almost deserted.

  “Okay, stay on it. What about Harry Potter?”

  “Who?”

  “The detective. Not Potter. I mean—”

  “Bosch. Harry Bosch. I’m working on that, too. Supposedly he’s one of the best. Retired a few years ago and the police chief himself recruited him back. Or so the story goes.”

  Cisco referred to some notes on a pad.

  “Full name is Hieronymus Bosch. He has a total of thirty-three years on the job and you know what that means.”

  “No, what does it mean?”

  “Well, under the LAPD’s pension program you max out at thirty years, meaning that you are eligible for retirement with full pension and no matter how long you stay on the job, after thirty years your pension doesn’t grow. So it makes no economic sense to stay.”

  “Unless you’re a man on a mission.”

  Cisco nodded.

  “Exactly. Anybody who stays past thirty isn’t staying for the money or the job. It’s more than a job.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You said Hieronymus Bosch? Like the painter?”

  The second question confused him.

  “I don’t know anything about any painter. But that’s his name. Rhymes with ‘anonymous,’ I was told. Weird name, if you ask me.”

  “No weirder than Wojciechowski—if you ask me.”

  Cisco was about to defend his name and heritage when Lorna cut in.

  “I thought you said you didn’t know him, Mickey.”

  I looked over at her and shook my head.

  “I never met him before today but the name . . . I know the name.”

  “You mean from the paintings?”

  I didn’t want to get into a discussion of past history so distant I couldn’t be sure about it.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s nothing and I’ve got to get going.”

  I stood up.

  “Cisco, stay on the case and find out what you can about Bosch. I want to know how much I can trust the guy.”

  “You’re not going to let him look at the files, are you?” Lorna asked.

  “This wasn’t a random crime. There’s a killer out there who knew how to get to Jerry Vincent. I’ll feel a lot better about things if our man with a mission can figure it out and bring the bad guy in.”

  I stepped around the desk and headed toward the door.

  “I’ll be in Judge Champagne’s court. I’m taking a bunch of the active files with me to read while I’m waiting.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” Lorna said.

  I saw her throw a look and nod at Cisco so that he would stay behind. We walked out to the reception area. I knew what Lorna was going to say but I let her say it.

  “Mickey, are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “This wasn’t the plan. You were going to come back slowly, remember? Take a couple cases and build from there. Instead, you’re taking on an entire practice.”

  “I’m not practicing.”

  “Look, be serious.”

  “I am. And I’m ready. Don’t you see that this is better than the plan? The Elliot case not only brings in all that money but it’s going to be like having a billboard on top of the CCB that says I’M BACK in big neon letters!”

  “Yeah, that’s great. And the Elliot case alone is going to put so much pressure on you that . . .”

  She didn’t finish but she didn’t have to.

  “Lorna, I’m done with all of that. I’m fine, I’m over it and I’m ready for this. I thought you’d be happy about this. We’ve got money coming in for the first time in a year.”

  “I don’t care about that. I want to make sure you are okay.”

  “I’m more than okay. I’m excited. I fee
l like in one day I’ve suddenly got my mojo back. Don’t drag me down. Okay?”

  She stared at me and I stared back and finally a reluctant smile peeked through her stern expression.

  “All right,” she said. “Then, go get ’em.”

  “Don’t worry. I will.”

  Eight

  Despite the assurances I had given Lorna, thoughts about all the cases and all the setup work that needed to be done played in my mind as I walked down the hallway to the bridge that linked the office building with the garage. I had forgotten that I had parked on the fifth level and ended up walking up three ramps before I found the Lincoln. I popped the trunk and put the thick stack of files I was carrying into my bag.

  The bag was a hybrid I had picked up at a store called Suitcase City while I was plotting my comeback. It was a backpack with straps I could put over my shoulders on the days I was strong. It also had a handle so I could carry it like a briefcase if I wanted. And it had two wheels and a telescoping handle so I could just roll it behind me on the days I was weak.

  Lately, the strong days far outnumbered the weak and I probably could have gotten by with the traditional lawyer’s leather briefcase. But I liked the bag and was going to keep using it. It had a logo on it—a mountain ridgeline with the words “Suitcase City” printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of desire and hope. I think that logo was the real reason I liked the bag. Because I knew Suitcase City wasn’t a store. It was a place. It was Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically—any way you want to look at it—everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

  As I closed the trunk, I was startled to see a man standing between my car and the one parked next to it. The open trunk lid had blocked my view of his approach. He was a stranger to me but I could tell he knew who I was. Bosch’s warning about Vincent’s killer shot through my mind and the fight-or-flight instinct gripped me.