THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2005) Read online

  "No sweat," he said to me. "I'll be back."

  And I didn't doubt it. In a way, Darius McGinley was just as much a franchise client as Louis Roulet. Roulet was most likely a one-shot deal. But over the years, I had a feeling McGinley would be one of what I call my "annuity clients." He would be the gift that would keep on giving-as long as he defied the odds and kept on living.

  I put the McGinley file in my briefcase and headed back through the gate while the next case was called. Outside the courtroom Raul Levin was waiting for me in the crowded hallway. We had a scheduled meeting to go over his findings in the Roulet case. He'd had to come to Compton because I had a busy schedule.

  "Top o' the morning," Levin said in an exaggerated Irish accent.

  "Yeah, you saw that?"

  "I stuck my head in. The guy's a bit of a racist, isn't he?"

  "And he can get away with it because ever since they unified the courts into one countywide district, his name goes on the ballot everywhere. Even if the people of Compton rose up like a wave to vote him off, the Westsiders could still cancel them out. It's fucked up."

  "How'd he get on the bench in the first place?"

  "Hey, you get a law degree and make the right contributions to the right people and you could be a judge, too. He was appointed by the governor. The hard part is winning that first retention election. He did. You've never heard the 'In like Flynn' story?"

  "Nope."

  "You'll love it. About six years ago Flynn gets his appointment from the governor. This is before unification. Back then judges were elected by the voters of the district where they presided. The supervising judge for L.A. County checks out his credentials and pretty quickly realizes that he's got a guy with lots of political connections but no talent or courthouse experience to go with it. Flynn was basically an office lawyer. Probably couldn't find a courthouse, let alone try a case, if you paid him. So the presiding judge dumps him down here in Compton criminal because the rule is you have to run for retention the year after being appointed to the bench. He figures Flynn will fuck up, anger the folks and get voted out. One year and out."

  "Headache over."

  "Exactly. Only it didn't work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown walks into the clerk's office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?"

  "Not personally. I know of her."

  "So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she's black, she's a woman and she's popular in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better."

  "Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?"

  "That's what I'm getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in-though it was kind of curious why she'd want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures with her practice."

  "So what happened?"

  "What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk's office and withdraws from the ballot."

  Levin nodded.

  "So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat," he said.

  "You got it. Then unification comes in and they'll never be able to get him out of there."

  Levin looked outraged.

  "That's bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that's gotta be a violation of election laws."

  "Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie has always maintained that she wasn't paid off or part of some plan Flynn cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn't sustain her lifestyle on a judge's pay. But I'll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front of Flynn."

  "And they call it a justice system."

  "Yeah, they do."

  "So what do you think about Blake?"

  It had to be brought up. It was all anybody else was talking about. Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn't go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn't get it. The question wasn't whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.

  "What do I think?" I said. "I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn't there, it wasn't there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense-'If it wasn't him, who else could it have been?' Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don't hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it."

  "Spoken like a true defense attorney."

  "Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I'm jealous and I'm already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me."

  "I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I've got?"

  I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn't miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.

  "I don't have time to go anywhere," I said. "We can go sit in my car and grab a coffee. You got your stuff with you?"

  In answer Levin raised his briefcase and rapped his knuckles on its side.

  "But what about your driver?"

  "Don't worry about him."

  "Then let's do it."

  ELEVEN

  After we were in the Lincoln I told Earl to drive around and see if he could find a Starbucks. I needed coffee. "Ain' no Starbuck 'round here," Earl responded.

  I knew Earl was from the area but I didn't think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world. But I didn't argue the point. I just wanted coffee.

  "Okay, well, drive around and find a place that has coffee. Just don't go too far from the courthouse. We need to get back to drop Raul off after."

  "You got it."

  "And Earl? Put on your earphones while we talk about a case back here for a while, okay?"

  Earl fired up his iPod and plugged in the earbuds. He headed the Lincoln down Acacia in search of java. Soon we could hear the tinny sound of hip-hop coming from the front seat and Levin opened his briefcase on the fold-down table built into the back of the driver's seat.

  "Okay, what do you have for me?" I said. "I'm going to see the prosecutor today and I want to have more aces in my hand than he does. We also have the arraignment Monday."

  "I think I've got a few aces here," Levin replied.

  He sorted through things in his briefcase and then started his presentation.

  "Okay," he said, "let's begin with your client and then we'll check in on Reggie Campo. Your guy is pretty squeaky. Other than parking and speeding tickets-which he seems to have a problem avoiding and then a bigger problem paying-I couldn't find squat on him. He's pretty much your standard citizen."

  "What's with the tickets?"

  "Twice in the last four years he's let parking tickets-a lot of them-and a couple speeding tickets accumulate unpaid. Both times it went to warrant and your colleague C. C. Dobbs stepped in to pay them off and smooth things over."

  "I'm glad C.C.'s good for something. By 'paying them off,' I assume you mean the tickets, not the judges."

  "Let's hope so. Other than that, only one blip on the radar with Roulet."

  "What?"

  "At the first meeting when you were giving him the drill
about what to expect and so on and so forth, it comes out that he'd had a year at UCLA law and knew the system. Well, I checked on that. See, half of what I do is try to find out who is lying or who is the biggest liar of the bunch. So I check damn near everything. And most of the time it's easy to do because everything's on computer."

  "Right, I get it. So what about the law school, was that a lie?"

  "Looks like it. I checked the registrar's office and he's never been enrolled in the law school at UCLA."

  I thought about this. It was Dobbs who had brought up UCLA law and Roulet had just nodded. It was a strange lie for either one of them to have told because it didn't really get them anything. It made me think about the psychology behind it. Was it something to do with me? Did they want me to think of Roulet as being on the same level as me?

  "So if he lied about something like that . . . ," I said, thinking out loud.

  "Right," Levin said. "I wanted you to know about it. But I gotta say, that's it on the negative side for Mr. Roulet so far. He might've lied about law school but it looks like he didn't lie about his story-at least the parts I could check out."

  "Tell me."

  "Well, his track that night checks out. I got wits in here who put him at Nat's North, Morgan's and then the Lamplighter, bing, bing, bing. He did just what he told us he did. Right down to the number of martinis. Four total and at least one of them he left on the bar unfinished."

  "They remember him that well? They remember that he didn't even finish his drink?"

  I am always suspicious of perfect memory because there is no such thing. And it is my job and my skill to find the faults in the memory of witnesses. Whenever someone remembers too much, I get nervous-especially if the witness is for the defense.

  "No, I'm not just relying on a bartender's memory. I've got something here that you are going to love, Mick. And you better love me for it because it cost me a grand."

  From the bottom of his briefcase he pulled out a padded case that contained a small DVD player. I had seen people using them on planes before and had been thinking about getting one for the car. The driver could use it while waiting on me in court. And I could probably use it from time to time on cases like this one.

  Levin started loading in a DVD. But before he could play it the car pulled to a stop and I looked up. We were in front of a place called The Central Bean.

  "Let's get some coffee and then see what you've got there," I said.

  I asked Earl if he wanted anything and he declined the offer. Levin and I got out and went in. There was a short line for coffee. Levin spent the waiting time telling me about the DVD we were about to watch in the car.

  "I'm in Morgan's and want to talk to this bartender named Janice but she says I have to clear it first with the manager. So I go back to see him in the office and he's asking me what exactly I want to ask Janice about. There's something off about this guy. I'm wondering why he wants to know so much, you know? Then it comes clear when he makes an offer. He tells me that last year they had a problem behind the bar. Pilferage from the cash register. They have as many as a dozen bartenders working back there in a given week and he couldn't figure out who had sticky fingers."

  "He put in a camera."

  "You got it. A hidden camera. He caught the thief and fired his ass. But it worked so good he kept the camera in place. The system records on high-density tape from eight till two every night. It's on a timer. He gets four nights on a tape. If there is ever a problem or a shortage he can go back and check it. Because they do a weekly profit-and-loss check, he rotates two tapes so he always has a week's worth of film to look at."

  "He had the night in question on tape?"

  "Yes, he did."

  "And he wanted a thousand dollars for it."

  "Right again."

  "The cops don't know about it?"

  "They haven't even come to the bar yet. They're just going with Reggie's story so far."

  I nodded. This wasn't all that unusual. There were too many cases for the cops to investigate thoroughly and completely. They were already loaded for bear, anyway. They had an eyewitness victim, a suspect caught in her apartment, they had the victim's blood on the suspect and even the weapon. To them, there was no reason to go further.

  "But we're interested in the bar, not the cash register," I said.

  "I know that. And the cash register is against the wall behind the bar. The camera is up above it in a smoke detector on the ceiling. And the back wall is a mirror. I looked at what he had and pretty quickly realized that you can see the whole bar in the mirror. It's just reversed. I had the tape transferred to a disc because we can manipulate the image better. Blow it up and zero in, that sort of thing."

  It was our turn in line. I ordered a large coffee with cream and sugar and Levin ordered a bottle of water. We took our refreshments back to the car. I told Earl not to drive until after we'd viewed the DVD. I can read while riding in a car but I thought looking at the small screen of Levin's player while bumping along south county streets might give me a dose of motion sickness.

  Levin started the DVD and gave a running commentary to go with the visuals.

  On the small screen was a downward view of the rectangular-shaped bar at Morgan's. There were two bartenders on patrol, both women in black jeans and white shirts tied off to show flat stomachs, pierced navels and tattoos creeping up out of their rear belt lines. As Levin had explained, the camera was angled toward the back of the bar area and cash register but the mirror that covered the wall behind the register displayed the line of customers sitting at the bar. I saw Louis Roulet sit down by himself in the dead center of the frame. There was a frame counter in the bottom left corner and a time and date code in the right corner. It said that it was 8:11P.M. on March 6.

  "There's Louis showing up," Levin said. "And over here is Reggie Campo."

  He manipulated buttons on the player and froze the image. He then shifted it, bringing the right margin into the center. On the short side of the bar to the right a woman and a man sat next to each other. Levin zoomed in on them.

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  I had only seen pictures of the woman with her face badly bruised and swollen.

  "Yeah, it's her. And that's our Mr. X."

  "Okay."

  "Now watch."

  He started the film moving again and widened the picture back to full frame. He then started moving it in fast-forward mode.

  "Louis drinks his martini, he talks with the bartenders and nothing much happens for almost an hour," Levin said.

  He checked a notebook page that had notes attributed to specific frame numbers. He slowed the image to normal speed at the right moment and shifted the frame again so that Reggie Campo and Mr. X were in the center of the screen. I noticed that we had advanced to 8:43 on the time code.

  On the screen Mr. X took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter off the bar and slid off his stool. He then walked out of camera range to the right.

  "He's heading to the front door," Levin said. "They have a smoking porch in the front."

  Reggie Campo appeared to watch Mr. X go and then she slid off her stool and started walking along the front of the bar, just behind the patrons on stools. As she passed by Roulet she appeared to drag the fingers of her left hand across his shoulders, almost in a tickling gesture. This made Roulet turn and watch her as she kept going.

  "She just gave him a little flirt there," Levin said. "She's heading to the bathroom."

  "That's not how Roulet said it went down," I said. "He claimed she came on to him, gave him her -"

  "Just hold your horses," Levin said. "She's got to come back from the can, you know."

  I waited and watched Roulet at the bar. I checked my watch. I was doing okay for the time being but I couldn't miss the calendar call at the CCB. I had already pushed the judge's patience to the max by not showing up the day before.

  "Here she comes," Levin said.

  Leaning closer to the screen I watched as Regg
ie Campo came back along the bar line. This time when she got to Roulet she squeezed up to the bar between him and a man on the next stool to the right. She had to move into the space sideways and her breasts were clearly pushed against Roulet's right arm. It was a come-on if I had ever seen one. She said something and Roulet bent over closer to her lips to hear. After a few moments he nodded and then I saw her put what looked like a crumpled cocktail napkin into his hand. They had one more verbal exchange and then Reggie Campo kissed Louis Roulet on the cheek and pulled backwards away from the bar. She headed back to her stool.