The Brass Verdict Read online

  She nodded her head again and put her glasses back on. She reached over and picked up a glass of water that had been hidden from my view by her desktop computer.

  After drinking deeply from the glass she spoke.

  “All right, Mr. Haller. I believe that if you vet the files as you have suggested, then you will be acting in an appropriate and acceptable manner. I would like you to file a motion with this court that explains your actions and the feeling of threat you are under. I will sign it and seal it and with any good luck it will be something that never sees the light of day.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think that is it.”

  “Then, have a good day.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Thank you.”

  I got up and headed toward the door but then remembered something and turned back to stand in front of the judge’s desk.

  “Judge? I forgot something. I saw your calendar from last week out there and noticed that Jerry Vincent came in on the Elliot matter. I haven’t thoroughly reviewed the case file yet, but do you mind my asking what the hearing was about?”

  The judge had to think for a moment to recall the hearing.

  “It was an emergency motion. Mr. Vincent came in because Judge Stanton had revoked bail and ordered Mr. Elliot remanded to custody. I stayed the revocation.”

  “Why was it revoked?”

  “Mr. Elliot had traveled to a film festival in New York without getting permission. It was one of the qualifiers of bail. When Mr. Golantz, the prosecutor, saw a picture of Elliot at the festival in People magazine, he asked Judge Stanton to revoke bail. He obviously wasn’t happy that bail had been allowed in the first place. Judge Stanton revoked and then Mr. Vincent came to me for an emergency stay of his client’s arrest and incarceration. I decided to give Mr. Elliot a second chance and to modify his freedom by making him wear an ankle monitor. But I can assure you that Mr. Elliot will not receive a third chance. Keep that in mind if you should retain him as a client.”

  “I understand, Judge. Thank you.”

  I nodded and left the chambers, thanking Mrs. Gill as I walked out through the courtroom.

  Harry Bosch’s card was still in my pocket. I dug it out while I was going down in the elevator. I had parked in a pay lot by the Kyoto Grand Hotel and had a three-block walk that would take me right by Parker Center. I called Bosch’s cell phone as I headed to the courthouse exit.

  “This is Bosch.”

  “It’s Mickey Haller.”

  There was a hesitation. I thought that maybe he didn’t recognize my name.

  “What can I do for you?” he finally asked.

  “How’s the investigation going?”

  “It’s going, but nothing I can talk to you about.”

  “Then I’ll just get to the point. Are you in Parker Center right now?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “I’m heading over from the courthouse. Meet me out front by the memorial.”

  “Look, Haller, I’m busy. Can you just tell me what this is about?”

  “Not on the phone, but I think it will be worth your while. If you’re not there when I go by, then I’ll know you’ve passed on the opportunity and I won’t bother you with it again.”

  I closed the phone before he could respond. It took me five minutes to get over to Parker Center by foot. The place was in its last years of life, its replacement being built a block over on Spring Street. I saw Bosch standing next to the fountain that was part of the memorial for officers killed in the line of duty. I saw thin white wires leading from his ears to his jacket pocket. I walked up and didn’t bother with a handshake or any other greeting. He pulled the earbuds out and shoved them into his pocket.

  “Shutting the world out, Detective?”

  “Helps me concentrate. Is there a purpose to this meeting?”

  “After you left the office today I looked at the files you had stacked on the table. In the file room.”

  “And?”

  “And I understand what you are trying to do. I want to help you but I want you to understand my position.”

  “I understand you, Counselor. You have to protect those files and the possible killer hiding in them because those are the rules.”

  I shook my head. This guy didn’t want to make it easy for me to help him.

  “I’ll tell you what, Detective Bosch. Come back by the office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning and I will give you what I can.”

  I think the offer surprised him. He had no response.

  “You’ll be there?” I asked.

  “What’s the catch?” he asked right back.

  “No catch. Just don’t be late. I’ve got an interview at nine, and after that I’ll probably be on the road for client conferences.”

  “I’ll be there at eight.”

  “Okay, then.”

  I was ready to walk away but it looked like he wasn’t.

  “What is it?”

  “I was going to ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “Did Vincent have any federal cases?”

  I thought for a moment, going over what I knew of the files. I shook my head.

  “We’re still reviewing everything but I don’t think so. He was like me, liked to stay in state court. It’s a numbers game. More cases, more fuck-ups, more holes to slip through. The feds kind of like to stack the deck. They don’t like to lose.”

  I thought he might take the slight personally. But he had moved past it and was putting something in place. He nodded.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you wanted to ask?”

  “That’s it.”

  I waited for further explanation but none came.

  “Okay, Detective.”

  I clumsily put out my hand. He shook it and appeared to feel just as awkward about it. I decided to ask a question I had been holding back on.

  “Hey, there was something I was meaning to ask you, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It doesn’t say it on your card but I heard that your full name is Hieronymus Bosch. Is that true?”

  “What about it?”

  “I was just wondering, where’d you get a name like that?”

  “My mother gave it to me.”

  “Your mother? Well, what did your father think about it?”

  “I never asked him. I have to get back to the investigation now, Counselor. Is there anything else?”

  “No, that was it. I was just curious. I’ll see you tomorrow at eight.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I left him standing there at the memorial and walked away. I headed down the block, thinking the whole time about why he had asked if Jerry Vincent had had any federal cases. When I turned left at the corner, I glanced back and saw Bosch still standing by the fountain. He was watching me. He didn’t look away, but I did, and I kept walking.

  Eleven

  Cisco and Lorna were still at work in Jerry Vincent’s office when I got back. I handed the court order for the bank over to Lorna and told her about the two early appointments I had set for the next day.

  “I thought you put Patrick Henson into the dog pile,” Lorna said.

  “I did. But now I moved him back.”

  She put her eyebrows together the way she did whenever I confounded her—which was a lot. I didn’t want to explain things. Moving on, I asked if anything new had developed while I had gone to court.

  “A couple things,” Lorna said. “First of all, the check from Walter Elliot cleared. If he heard about Jerry it’s too late to stop payment.”

  “Good.”

  “It gets better. I found the contracts file and took a look at Jerry’s deal with Elliot. That hundred thousand deposited Friday for trial was only a partial payment.”

  She was right. It was getting better.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “According to the deal,” she said, “Vincent took t
wo fifty up front. That was five months ago and it looks like that is all gone. But he was going to get another two fifty for the trial. Nonrefundable. The hundred was only the first part of that. The rest is due on the first day of testimony.”

  I nodded with satisfaction. Vincent had made a great deal. I had never had a case with that kind of money involved. But I wondered how he had blown through the first $250,000 so quickly. Lorna would have to study the ins and outs of the accounts to get that answer.

  “Okay, all of that’s real good—if we get Elliot. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. What else do we have?”

  Lorna looked disappointed that I didn’t want to linger over the money and celebrate her discovery. She had lost sight of the fact that I still had to nail Elliot down. Technically, he was a free agent. I would get the first shot at him but I still had to secure him as a client before I could consider what it would be like to get a $250,000 trial fee.

  Lorna answered my question in a monotone.

  “We had a series of visitors while you were in court.”

  “Who?”

  “First, one of the investigators Jerry used came by after hearing the news. He took one look at Cisco and almost got into it with him. Then he got smart and backed down.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Bruce Carlin. Jerry hired him to work the Elliot case.”

  I nodded. Bruce Carlin was a former LAPD bull who had crossed to the dark side and did defense work now. A lot of attorneys used him because of his insider’s knowledge of how things worked in the cop shop. I had used him on a case once and thought he was living off an undeserved reputation. I never hired him again.

  “Call him back,” I said. “Set up a time for him to come back in.”

  “Why, Mick? You’ve got Cisco.”

  “I know I’ve got Cisco but Carlin was doing work on Elliot and I doubt it’s all in the files. You know how it is. If you keep it out of the file, you keep it out of discovery. So bring him in. Cisco can sit down with him and find out what he’s got. Pay him for his time—whatever his hourly rate is—and then cut him loose when he’s no longer useful. What else? Who else came in?”

  “A real loser’s parade. Carney Andrews waltzed in, thinking she was going to just pick the Elliot case up off the pile and waltz back out with it. I sent her away empty-handed. I then looked through the P and Os in the operating account and saw she was hired five months ago as associate counsel on Elliot. A month later she was dropped.”

  I nodded and understood. Vincent had been judge shopping for Elliot. Carney Andrews was an untalented attorney and weasel, but she was married to a superior court judge named Bryce Andrews. He had spent twenty-five years as a prosecutor before being appointed to the bench. In the view of most criminal defense attorneys who worked in the CCB, he had never left the DA’s office. He was believed to be one of the toughest judges in the building, one who at times acted in concert with, if not as a direct arm of, the prosecutor’s office. This created a cottage industry in which his wife made a very comfortable living by being hired as co-counsel on cases in her husband’s court, thereby creating a conflict of interest that would require the reassignment of the cases to other, hopefully more lenient, judges.

  It worked like a charm and the best part was that Carney Andrews never really had to practice law. She just had to sign on to a case, make an appearance as co-counsel in court and then wait until it was reassigned from her husband’s calendar. She could then collect a substantial fee and move on to the next case.

  I didn’t have to even look into the Elliot file to see what had happened. I knew. Case assignments were generated by random selection in the chief judge’s office. The Elliot case had obviously been initially assigned to Bryce Andrews’s court and Vincent didn’t like his chances there. For starters, Andrews would never allow bail on a double-murder case, let alone the hard line he would take against the defendant when it got to trial. So Vincent hired the judge’s wife as co-counsel and the problem went away. The case was then randomly reassigned to Judge James P. Stanton, whose reputation was completely the opposite of Andrews’s. The bottom line was that whatever Vincent had paid Carney, it had been worth it.

  “Did you check?” I asked Lorna. “How much did he pay her?”

  “She took ten percent of the initial advance.”

  I whistled. Twenty-five thousand dollars for nothing. That at least explained where some of the first quarter million went.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” I said.

  “But then you’d have to sleep at night with Bryce Andrews,” Lorna said. “I’m not sure that would be worth it.”

  Cisco laughed. I didn’t but Lorna did have a point. Bryce Andrews had at least twenty years and almost two hundred pounds on his wife. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  “That it on the visitors?” I asked.

  “No,” Lorna said. “We also had a couple of clients drop by to ask for their files after they heard on the radio about Jerry’s death.”

  “And?”

  “We stalled them. I told them that only you could turn over a file and that you would get back to them within twenty-four hours. It looked like they wanted to argue about it but with Cisco here they decided it would be better to wait.”

  She smiled at Cisco and the big man bowed as if to say “at your service.”

  Lorna handed me a slip of paper.

  “Those are the names. There’s contact info, too.”

  I looked at the names. One was in the dog pile, so I would be happily turning the file over. The other was a public indecency case that I thought I could do something with. The woman was charged when a sheriff’s deputy ordered her out of the water on a Malibu beach. She was swimming nude but this was not apparent until the deputy ordered her out of the water. Because the charge was a misdemeanor, the deputy had to witness the crime to make an arrest. But by ordering her out of the water, he created the crime he arrested her for. That wouldn’t fly in court. It was a case I knew I could get dismissed.

  “I’ll go see these two tonight,” I said. “In fact, I want to hit the road with all of the cases soon. Starting with a stop at Archway Pictures. I’m going to take Cisco with me, and Lorna, I want you to gather up whatever you need from here and head on home. I don’t want you being here by yourself.”

  She nodded but then said, “Are you sure Cisco should go with you?”

  I was surprised she had asked the question in front of him. She was referring to his size and appearance—the tattoos, the earring, the boots, leather vest and so on—the overall menace his appearance projected. Her concern was that he might scare away more clients than he would help lock down.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He should go. When I want to be subtle he can just wait in the car. Besides, I want him driving so I can look at the files.”

  I looked at Cisco. He nodded and seemed fine with the arrangement. He might look foolish in his bike vest behind the wheel of a Lincoln but he wasn’t complaining yet.

  “Speaking of the files,” I said. “We have nothing in federal court, right?”

  Lorna shook her head.

  “Not that I know of.”

  I nodded. It confirmed what I had indicated to Bosch and made me more curious about why he had asked about federal cases. I was beginning to get an idea about it and planned to bring it up when I saw him the next morning.

  “Okay,” I said. “I guess it’s time for me to be a Lincoln lawyer again. Let’s hit the road.”

  Twelve

  In the last decade Archway Pictures had grown from a movie industry fringe dweller to a major force. This was because of the one thing that had always ruled Hollywood. Money. As the cost of producing films grew exponentially at the same time the industry focused on the most expensive kinds of films to make, the major studios began increasingly to look for partners to share the cost and risk.

  This is where Walter Elliot and Archway Pictures came in. Archway was previously an overrun lot. It was on Melrose Avenue just a few bl
ocks from the behemoth that was Paramount Studios. Archway was built to act as the remora fish does with the great white shark. It would hover near the mouth of the bigger fish and take whatever torn scraps somehow missed being sucked into the giant maw. Archway offered production facilities and soundstages for rent when everything was booked at the big studios. It leased office space to would-be and has-been producers who weren’t up to the standards of or didn’t have the same deals as on-lot producers. It nurtured independent films, the movies that were less expensive to make but more risky and supposedly less likely to be hits than their studio-bred counterparts.

  Walter Elliot and Archway Pictures limped along in this fashion for a decade, until luck and lightning struck twice. In a space of only three years Elliot hit gold with two of the independent films he’d backed by providing soundstages, equipment, and production facilities in exchange for a piece of the action. The films went on to defy Hollywood expectations and became huge hits—critically and financially. One even took home the Academy Award as best picture. Walter and his stepchild studio suddenly basked in the glow of huge success. More than one hundred million people heard Walter being personally thanked on the Academy Awards broadcast. And, more important, Archway’s worldwide cut from the two films was more than a hundred million dollars apiece.

  Walter did a wise thing with that newfound money. He fed it to the sharks, cofinancing a number of productions in which the big studios were looking for risk partners. There were some misses, of course. The business, after all, was Hollywood. But there were enough hits to keep the nest egg growing. Over the next decade Walter Elliot doubled and then tripled his stake and along the way became a player who made regular appearances on the power 100 lists in industry minds and magazines. Elliot had taken Archway from being an address associated with Hollywood pariahs to a place where there was a three-year wait for a windowless office.