The Lincoln Lawyer Read online

  It was said as routine conversation. No threat in his voice or words. And I didn’t feel threatened. Two years ago I got an abduction and aggravated assault case against Vogel knocked down to a disturbing the peace. He ran a Saints-owned strip club on Sepulveda in Van Nuys. His arrest came after he learned that one of his most productive dancers had quit and crossed the street to work at a competing club. Vogel had crossed the street after her, grabbed her off the stage and carried her back to his club. She was naked. A passing motorist called the police. Knocking the case down was one of my better plays and Vogel knew this. He had a soft spot for me.

  “He’s pretty much got it right,” I said. “I work for a living. If he wants me to work for him he’s gotta pay me.”

  “We gave you five grand in December,” Vogel said.

  “That’s long gone, Ted. More than half went to the expert who is going to blow the case up. The rest went to me and I already worked off those hours. If I’m going to take it to trial, then I need to refill the tank.”

  “You want another five?”

  “No, I need ten and I told Hard Case that last week. It’s a three-day trial and I’ll need to bring my expert in from Kodak in New York. I’ve got his fee to cover and he wants first class in the air and the Chateau Marmont on the ground. Thinks he’s going to be drinking at the bar with movie stars or something. That place is four hundred a night just for the cheap rooms.”

  “You’re killing me, Counselor. Whatever happened to that slogan you had in the yellow pages? ‘Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.’ You call ten grand reasonable?”

  “I liked that slogan. It brought in a lot of clients. But the California bar wasn’t so pleased with it, made me get rid of it. Ten is the price and it is reasonable, Ted. If you can’t or don’t want to pay it, I’ll file the paperwork today. I’ll drop out and he can go with a PD. I’ll turn everything I have over. But the PD probably won’t have the budget to fly in the photo expert.”

  Vogel shifted his position on the window sill and the car shuddered under the weight.

  “No, no, we want you. Hard Case is important to us, you know what I mean? I want him out and back to work.”

  I watched him reach inside his vest with a hand that was so fleshy that the knuckles were indented. It came out with a thick envelope that he passed into the car to me.

  “Is this cash?” I asked.

  “That’s right. What’s wrong with cash?”

  “Nothing. But I have to give you a receipt. It’s an IRS reporting requirement. This is the whole ten?”

  “It’s all there.”

  I took the top off of a cardboard file box I keep on the seat next to me. My receipt book was behind the current case files. I started writing out the receipt. Most lawyers who get disbarred go down because of financial violations. The mishandling or misappropriation of client fees. I kept meticulous records and receipts. I would never let the bar get to me that way.

  “So you had it all along,” I said as I wrote. “What if I had backed down to five? What would you have done then?”

  Vogel smiled. He was missing one of his front teeth on the bottom. Had to have been a fight at the club. He patted the other side of his vest.

  “I got another envelope with five in it right here, Counselor,” he said. “I was ready for you.”

  “Damn, now I feel bad, leaving you with money in your pocket.”

  I tore out his copy of the receipt and handed it out the window.

  “I receipted it to Casey. He’s the client.”

  “Fine with me.”

  He took the receipt and dropped his arm off the window sill as he stood up straight. The car returned to a normal level. I wanted to ask him where the money came from, which of the Saints’ criminal enterprises had earned it, whether a hundred girls had danced a hundred hours for him to pay me, but that was a question I was better off not knowing the answer to. I watched Vogel saunter back to his Harley and struggle to swing a trash can-thick leg over the seat. For the first time I noticed the double shocks on the back wheel. I told Earl to get back on the freeway and get going to Van Nuys, where I now needed to make a stop at the bank before hitting the courthouse to meet my new client.

  As we drove I opened the envelope and counted out the money, twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. It was all there. The tank was refilled and I was good to go with Harold Casey. I would go to trial and teach his young prosecutor a lesson. I would win, if not in trial, then certainly on appeal. Casey would return to the family and work of the Road Saints. His guilt in the crime he was charged with was not something I even considered as I filled out a deposit slip for my client fees account.

  “Mr. Haller?” Earl said after a while.

  “What, Earl?”

  “That man you told him was coming in from New York to be the expert? Will I be picking him up at the airport?”

  I shook my head.

  “There is no expert coming in from New York, Earl. The best camera and photo experts in the world are right here in Hollywood.”

  Now Earl nodded and his eyes held mine for a moment in the rearview mirror. Then he looked back at the road ahead.

  “I see,” he said, nodding again.

  And I nodded to myself. No hesitation in what I had done or said. That was my job. That was how it worked. After fifteen years of practicing law I had come to think of it in very simple terms. The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked up people and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become expert at going into the machine and fixing things and extracting what I needed from it in return.

  There was nothing about the law that I cherished anymore. The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system’s checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. I didn’t deal in guilt and innocence, because everybody was guilty. Of something. But it didn’t matter, because every case I took on was a house built on a foundation poured by overworked and underpaid laborers. They cut corners. They made mistakes. And then they painted over the mistakes with lies. My job was to peel away the paint and find the cracks. To work my fingers and tools into those cracks and widen them. To make them so big that either the house fell down or, failing that, my client slipped through.

  Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.

  But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez.

  FOUR

  L ouis Ross Roulet was in a holding tank with seven other men who had made the half-block bus ride from the Van Nuys jail to the Van Nuys courthouse. There were only two white men in the cell and they sat next to each other on a bench while the six black men took the other side of the cell. It was a form of Darwinian segregation. They were all strangers but there was strength in numbers.

  Since Roulet supposedly came from Beverly Hills money, I looked at the two white men and it was easy to choose between them. One was rail thin with the desperate wet eyes of a hype who was long past fix time. The other looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I chose him.

  “Mr. Roulet?” I said, pronouncing the name the way Valenzuela had told me to.

  The deer nodded. I signaled him over to the bars so I could talk quietly.

  “My name is Michael Haller. People call me Mickey. I will be representing you during your first appearance today.”

  We were in the holding area behind the arraignment court, where attorneys are routinely allowed access to confer with clients before court begins. There is a blue line painted on the floor outside the cells. The three-foot line. I had to keep that distance from my client.

  Roulet grasped the bars in front of
me. Like the others in the cage, he had on ankle, wrist and belly chains. They wouldn’t come off until he was taken into the courtroom. He was in his early thirties and, though at least six feet tall and 180 pounds, he seemed slight. Jail will do that to you. His eyes were pale blue and it was rare for me to see the kind of panic that was so clearly set in them. Most of the time my clients have been in lockup before and they have the stone-cold look of the predator. It’s how they get by in jail.

  But Roulet was different. He looked like prey. He was scared and he didn’t care who saw it and knew it.

  “This is a setup,” he said urgently and loudly. “You have to get me out of here. I made a mistake with that woman, that’s all. She’s trying to set me up and —”

  I put my hands up to stop him.

  “Be careful what you say in here,” I said in a low voice. “In fact, be careful what you say until we get you out of here and can talk in private.”

  He looked around, seemingly not understanding.

  “You never know who is listening,” I said. “And you never know who will say he heard you say something, even if you didn’t say anything. Best thing is to not talk about the case at all. You understand? Best thing is not to talk to anyone about anything, period.”

  He nodded and I signaled him down to the bench next to the bars. There was a bench against the opposite wall and I sat down.

  “I am really here just to meet you and tell you who I am,” I said. “We’ll talk about the case after we get you out. I already spoke to your family lawyer, Mr. Dobbs, out there and we will tell the judge that we are prepared to post bail. Do I have all of that right?”

  I opened a leather Mont Blanc folder and prepared to take notes on a legal pad. Roulet nodded. He was learning.

  “Good,” I said. “Tell me about yourself. How old you are, whether you’re married, what ties you have to the community.”

  “Um, I’m thirty-two. I’ve lived here my whole life—even went to school here. UCLA. Not married. No kids. I work —”

  “Divorced?”

  “No, never married. I work for my family’s business. Windsor Residential Estates. It’s named after my mother’s second husband. It’s real estate. We sell real estate.”

  I was writing notes. Without looking up at him, I quietly asked, “How much money did you make last year?”

  When Roulet didn’t answer I looked up at him.

  “Why do you need to know that?” he asked.

  “Because I am going to get you out of here before the sun goes down today. To do that, I need to know everything about your standing in the community. That includes your financial standing.”

  “I don’t know exactly what I made. A lot of it was shares in the company.”

  “You didn’t file taxes?”

  Roulet looked over his shoulder at the others in the cell and then whispered his answer.

  “Yes, I did. On that my income was a quarter million.”

  “But what you’re saying is that with the shares you earned in the company you really made more.”

  “Right.”

  One of Roulet’s cellmates came up to the bars next to him. The other white man. He had an agitated manner, his hands in constant motion, moving from hips to pockets to each other in desperate grasps.

  “Hey, man, I need a lawyer, too. You got a card?”

  “Not for you, pal. They’ll have a lawyer out there for you.”

  I looked back at Roulet and waited a moment for the hype to move away. He didn’t. I looked back at him.

  “Look, this is private. Could you leave us alone?”

  The hype made some kind of motion with his hands and shuffled back to the corner he had come from. I looked back at Roulet.

  “What about charitable organizations?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” Roulet responded.

  “Are you involved in any charities? Do you give to any charities?”

  “Yeah, the company does. We give to Make a Wish and a runaway shelter in Hollywood. I think it’s called My Friend’s Place or something like that.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “Are you going to get me out?”

  “I’m going to try. You’ve got some heavy charges on you—I checked before coming back here—and I have a feeling the DA is going to request no bail, but this is good stuff. I can work with it.”

  I indicated my notes.

  “No bail?” he said in a loud, panicked voice.

  The others in the cell looked in his direction because what he had said was their collective nightmare. No bail.

  “Calm down,” I said. “I said that is what she is going to go for. I didn’t say she would get it. When was the last time you were arrested?”

  I always threw that in out of the blue so I could watch their eyes and see if there was going to be a surprise thrown at me in court.

  “Never. I’ve never been arrested. This whole thing is —”

  “I know, I know, but we don’t want to talk about that here, remember?”

  He nodded. I looked at my watch. Court was about to start and I still needed to talk to Maggie McFierce.

  “I’m going to go now,” I said. “I’ll see you out there in a few minutes and we’ll see about getting you out of here. When we are out there, don’t say anything until you check with me. If the judge asks you how you are doing, you check with me. Okay?”

  “Well, don’t I say ‘not guilty’ to the charges?”

  “No, they’re not going to even ask you that. Today all they do is read you the charges, talk about bail and set a date for an arraignment. That’s when we say ‘not guilty.’ So today you say nothing. No outbursts, nothing. Got that?”

  He nodded and frowned.

  “Are you going to be all right, Louis?”

  He nodded glumly.

  “Just so you know,” I said. “I charge twenty-five hundred dollars for a first appearance and bail hearing like this. Is that going to be a problem?”

  He shook his head no. I liked that he wasn’t talking. Most of my clients talk way too much. Usually they talk themselves right into prison.

  “Good. We can talk about the rest of it after you are out of here and we can get together in private.”

  I closed my leather folder, hoping he had noticed it and was impressed, then stood up.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Why’d you pick me? There’s a lot of lawyers out there, why me?”

  It was a question that didn’t matter to our relationship but I wanted to test Valenzuela’s veracity.

  Roulet shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I remembered your name from something I read in the paper.”

  “What did you read about me?”

  “It was a story about a case where the evidence got thrown out against some guy. I think it was drugs or something. You won the case because they had no evidence after that.”

  “The Hendricks case?”

  It was the only one I could think of that had made the papers in recent months. Hendricks was another Road Saint client and the sheriff’s department had put a GPS bug on his Harley to track his deliveries. Doing that on public roads was fine. But when he parked his bike in the kitchen of his home at night, that bug constituted unlawful entry by the cops. The case was tossed by a judge during the preliminary hearing. It made a decent splash in the Times.

  “I can’t remember the name of the client,” Roulet said. “I just remembered your name. Your last name, actually. When I called the bail bondsman today I gave him the name Haller and asked him to get you and to call my own attorney. Why?”

  “No reason. Just curious. I appreciate the call. I’ll see you in the courtroom.”

  I put the differences between what Roulet had said about my hiring and what Valenzuela had told me into the bank for later consideration and made my way back into the arraignment court. I saw Maggie McFierce sitting at one end of the prosecution table. She was there along with five other prosecutors. The table was large and L-s
haped so it could accommodate an endlessly revolving number of lawyers who could sit and still face the bench. A prosecutor assigned to the courtroom handled most of the routine appearances and arraignments that were paraded through each day. But special cases brought the big guns out of the district attorney’s office on the second floor of the courthouse next door. TV cameras did that, too.

  As I stepped through the bar I saw a man setting up a video camera on a tripod next to the bailiff’s desk. There was no network symbol on the camera or the man’s clothes. The man was a freelancer who had gotten wind of the case and would shoot the hearing and then try to sell it to one of the local stations whose news director needed a thirty-second story. When I had checked with the bailiff earlier about Roulet’s place on the calendar, he told me the judge had already authorized the filming.

  I walked up to my ex-wife from behind and bent down to whisper into her ear. She was looking at photographs in a file. She was wearing a navy suit with a thin gray stripe. Her raven-colored hair was tied back with a matching gray ribbon. I loved her hair when it was back like that.

  “Are you the one who used to have the Roulet case?”

  She looked up, not recognizing the whisper. Her face was involuntarily forming a smile but then it turned into a frown when she saw it was me. She knew exactly what I had meant by using the past tense and she slapped the file closed.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said.

  “Sorry. He liked what I did on Hendricks and gave me a call.”

  “Son of a bitch. I wanted this case, Haller. This is the second time you’ve done this to me.”

  “I guess this town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” I said in a poor Cagney imitation.

  She groaned.

  “All right,” she said in quick surrender. “I’ll go peacefully after this hearing. Unless you object to even that.”

  “I might. You going for a no-bail hold?”

  “That’s right. But that won’t change with the prosecutor. That was a directive from the second floor.”

  I nodded. That meant a case supervisor must have called for the no-bail hold.