“Perfect,” Dobbs said, pocketing the card without looking at it. “Should we come to you?”
“No, I’ll come to you. I’d like to see how the other half lives in those high-rises in Century City.”
Dobbs smiled glibly.
“It is obvious by your suit that you know and practice the adage that a trial lawyer should never dress too well. You want the jury to like you, not to be jealous of you. Well, Michael, a Century City lawyer can’t have an office that is nicer than the offices his clients come from. And so I can assure you that our offices are very modest.”
I nodded in agreement. But I was insulted just the same. I was wearing my best suit. I always did on Mondays.
“That’s good to know,” I said.
The courtroom door opened and the videographer walked out, lugging his camera and folded tripod with him. Dobbs saw him and immediately tensed.
“The media,” he said. “How can we control this? Mrs. Windsor won’t —”
“Hold on a sec.”
I called to the cameraman and he walked over. I immediately put my hand out. He had to put his tripod down to take it.
“I’m Michael Haller. I saw you in there filming my client’s appearance.”
Using my formal name was a code.
“Robert Gillen,” the cameraman said. “People call me Sticks.”
He gestured to his tripod in explanation. His use of his formal name was a return code. He was letting me know he understood that I had a play working here.
“Are you freelancing or on assignment?” I asked.
“Just freelancing today.”
“How’d you hear about this thing?”
He shrugged as though he was reluctant to answer.
“A source. A cop.”
I nodded. Gillen was locked in and playing along.
“What do you get for that if you sell it to a news station?”
“Depends. I take seven-fifty for an exclusive and five for a nonexclusive.”
Nonexclusive meant that any news director who bought the tape from him knew that he might sell the footage to a competing news station. Gillen had doubled the fees he actually got. It was a good move. He must have been listening to what had been said in the courtroom while he shot it.
“Tell you what,” I said. “How about we take it off your hands right now for an exclusive?”
Gillen was perfect. He hesitated like he was unsure of the ethics involved in the proposition.
“In fact, make it a grand,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “You got a deal.”
While Gillen put the camera on the floor and took the tape out of it, I pulled a wad of cash from my pocket. I had kept twelve hundred from the Saints cash Teddy Vogel had given me on the way down. I turned to Dobbs.
“I can expense this, right?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He was beaming.
I exchanged the cash for the tape and thanked Gillen. He pocketed the money and moved toward the elevators a happy man.
“That was brilliant,” Dobbs said. “We have to contain this. It could literally destroy the family’s business if this—in fact, I think that is one reason Mrs. Windsor was not here today. She didn’t want to be recognized.”
“Well, we’ll have to talk about that if this thing goes the distance. Meantime, I’ll do my best to keep it off the radar.”
“Thank you.”
A cell phone began to play a classical number by Bach or Beethoven or some other dead guy with no copyright and Dobbs reached inside his jacket, retrieved the device and checked the small screen on it.
“This is she,” he said.
“Then I’ll leave you to it.”
As I walked off I heard Dobbs saying, “Mary, everything is under control. We need now to concentrate on getting him out. We are going to need some money . . .”
While the elevator made its way up to me, I was thinking that I was pretty sure that I was dealing with a client and family for which “some money” meant more than I had ever seen. My mind moved back to the sartorial comment Dobbs had made about me. It still stung. The truth was, I didn’t have a suit in my closet that cost less than six hundred dollars and I always felt good and confident in any one of them. I wondered if he had intended to insult me or he had intended something else, maybe trying at this early stage of the game to imprint his control over me and the case. I decided I would need to watch my back with Dobbs. I would keep him close but not that close.
SIX
T raffic heading downtown bottlenecked in the Cahuenga Pass. I spent the time in the car working the phone and trying not to think about the conversation I’d had with Maggie McPherson about my parenting skills. My ex-wife had been right about me, and that’s what hurt. For a long time I had put my law practice ahead of my parenting practice. It was something I promised myself to change. I just needed the time and the money to slow down. I thought that maybe Louis Roulet would provide both.
In the back of the Lincoln I first called Raul Levin, my investigator, to put him on alert about the potential meeting with Roulet. I asked him to do a preliminary run on the case to see what he could find out. Levin had retired early from the LAPD and still had contacts and friends who did him favors from time to time. He probably had his own Christmas list. I told him not to spend a lot of time on it until I was sure I had Roulet locked down as a paying client. It didn’t matter what C. C. Dobbs had said to me face-to-face in the courthouse hallway. I wouldn’t believe I had the case until I got the first payment.
Next I checked on the status of a few cases and then called Lorna Taylor again. I knew the mail was delivered at her place most days right before noon. But she told me nothing of importance had come in. No checks and no correspondence I had to pay immediate attention to from the courts.
“Did you check on Gloria Dayton’s arraignment?” I asked her.
“Yes. It looks like they might hold her over until tomorrow on a medical.”
I groaned. The state has forty-eight hours to charge an individual after arrest and bring them before a judge. Holding Gloria Dayton’s first appearance over until the next day because of medical reasons meant that she was probably drug sick. This would help explain why she had been holding cocaine when she was arrested. I had not seen or spoken to her in at least seven months. Her slide must have been quick and steep. The thin line between controlling the drugs and the drugs controlling her had been crossed.
“Did you find out who filed it?” I asked.
“Leslie Faire,” she said.
I groaned again.
“That’s just great. Okay, well, I’m going to go down and see what I can do. I’ve got nothing going until I hear about Roulet.”
Leslie Faire was a misnamed prosecutor whose idea of giving a defendant a break or the benefit of the doubt was to offer extended parole supervision on top of prison time.
“Mick, when are you going to learn with this woman?” Lorna said about Gloria Dayton.
“Learn what?” I asked, although I knew exactly what Lorna would say.
“She drags you down every time you have to deal with her. She’s never going to get out of the life, and now you can bet she’s never going to be anything less than a twofer every time she calls. That would be fine, except you never charge her.”
What she meant by twofer was that Gloria Dayton’s cases would from now on be more complicated and time-consuming because it was likely that drug charges would always accompany solicitation or prostitution charges. What bothered Lorna was that this meant more work for me but no more income in the process.
“Well, the bar requires that all lawyers practice some pro bono work, Lorna. You know —”
“You don’t listen to me, Mick,” she said dismissively. “That’s exactly why we couldn’t stay married.”
I closed my eyes. What a day. I had managed to get both my ex-wives angry with me.
“What does this woman have on you?” she asked. “Why don’t you charge even a basic f
ee with her?”
“Look, she doesn’t have anything on me, okay?” I said. “Can we sort of change the subject now?”
I didn’t tell her that years earlier when I had looked through the dusty old account books from my father’s law practice, I had found that he’d had a soft spot for the so-called women of the night. He defended many and charged few. Maybe I was just continuing a family tradition.
“Fine,” Lorna said. “How did it go with Roulet?”
“You mean, did I get the job? I think so. Val’s probably getting him out right now. We’ll set up a meeting after that. I already asked Raul to sniff around on it.”
“Did you get a check?”
“Not yet.”
“Get the check, Mick.”
“I’m working on it.”
“How’s the case look?”
“I’ve only seen the pictures but it looks bad. I’ll know more after I see what Raul comes up with.”
“And what about Roulet?”
I knew what she was asking. How was he as a client? Would a jury, if it came to a jury, like him or despise him? Cases could be won or lost based on jurors’ impressions of the defendant.
“He looks like a babe in the woods.”
“He’s a virgin?”
“Never been inside the iron house.”
“Well, did he do it?”
She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn’t matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant “did it” or not. What mattered was the evidence against him—the proof—and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.
But the question of did he or didn’t he always seemed to matter to her.
“Who knows, Lorna? That’s not the question. The question is whether or not he’s a paying customer. The answer is, I think so.”
“Well, let me know if you need any—oh, there’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“Sticks called and said he owes you four hundred dollars next time he sees you.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“You’re doing pretty good today.”
“I’m not complaining.”
We said our good-byes on a friendly note, the dispute over Gloria Dayton seemingly forgotten for the moment. Probably the security that comes with knowing money is coming in and a high-paying client is on the hook made Lorna feel a bit better about my working some cases for free. I wondered, though, if she’d have minded so much if I was defending a drug dealer for free instead of a prostitute. Lorna and I had shared a short and sweet marriage, with both of us quickly finding out that we had moved too quickly while rebounding from divorces. We ended it, remained friends, and she continued to work with me, not for me. The only time I felt uncomfortable about the arrangement was when she acted like a wife again and second-guessed my choice of client and who and what I charged or didn’t charge.
Feeling confident in the way I had handled Lorna, I called the DA’s office in Van Nuys next. I asked for Margaret McPherson and caught her eating at her desk.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about this morning. I know you wanted the case.”
“Well, you probably need it more than me. He must be a paying customer if he’s got C. C. Dobbs carrying the roll behind him.”
By that she was referring to a roll of toilet paper. High-priced family lawyers were usually seen by prosecutors as nothing more than ass wipers for the rich and famous.
“Yeah, I could use one like him—the paying client, not the wiper. It’s been a while since I had a franchise.”
“Well, you didn’t get as lucky a few minutes ago,” she whispered into the phone. “The case was reassigned to Ted Minton.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s one of Smithson’s young guns. Just brought him in from downtown, where he was filing simple possession cases. He didn’t see the inside of a courtroom until he came up here.”
John Smithson was the ambitious head deputy in charge of the Van Nuys Division. He was a better politician than a prosecutor and had parlayed that skill into a quick climb over other more experienced deputies to the division chief’s post. Maggie McPherson was among those he’d passed by. Once he was in the slot, he started building a staff of young prosecutors who did not feel slighted and were loyal to him for giving them a shot.
“This guy’s never been in court?” I asked, not understanding how going up against a trial rookie could be unlucky, as Maggie had indicated.
“He’s had a few trials up here but always with a babysitter. Roulet will be his first time flying solo. Smithson thinks he’s giving him a slam dunk.”
I imagined her sitting in her cubicle, probably not far from where my new opponent was sitting in his.
“I don’t get it, Mags. If this guy’s green, why wasn’t I lucky?”
“Because these guys Smithson picks are all cracked out of the same mold. They’re arrogant assholes. They think they can do no wrong and what’s more . . .”
She lowered her voice even more.
“They don’t play fair. And the word on Minton is that he’s a cheater. Watch yourself, Haller. Better yet, watch him.”
“Well, thanks for the heads-up.”
But she wasn’t finished.
“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 ti
me 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.
The Lincoln Lawyer Page 5
