The Brass Verdict

by Michael Connelly

I WOULDN’T BE HERE

  Words to live by, I thought. Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.

  The unmistakable sound of a metal drawer being rolled and then banged closed spun me back around. On the other side of the room were two more doors. Both were open about a foot and through one I could see a darkened bathroom. Through the other I could see light.

  I approached the lighted room quickly and pushed the door all the way open. It was the file room, a large, windowless walk-in closet with rows of steel filing cabinets going down both sides. A small worktable was set up against the back wall.

  There were two men sitting at the work table. One old, one young. Probably one to teach and one to learn. They had their jackets off and draped over the chairs. I saw their guns and holsters and their badges clipped to their belts.

  “What are you doing?” I asked gruffly.

  The men looked up from their reading. I saw a stack of files on the table between them. The older detective’s eyes momentarily widened in surprise when he saw me.

  “LAPD,” he said. “And I guess I should ask you the same question.”

  “Those are my files and you’re going to have to put them down right now.”

  The older man stood up and came toward me. I started pulling the court order from my jacket again.

  “My name is—”

  “I know who you are,” the detective said. “But I still don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  I handed him the court order.

  “Then, this should explain it. I’ve been appointed by the chief judge of the superior court as replacement counsel to Jerry Vincent’s clients. That means his cases are now my cases. And you have no right to be in here looking through files. That is a clear violation of my clients’ right to protection against unlawful search and seizure. These files contain privileged attorney-client communications and information.”

  The detective didn’t bother looking at the paperwork. He quickly flipped through it to the signature and seal on the last page. He didn’t seem all that impressed.

  “Vincent’s been murdered,” he said. “The motive could be sitting in one of these files. The identity of the killer could be in one of them. We have to—”

  “No, you don’t. What you have to do is get out of this file room right now.”

  The detective didn’t move a muscle.

  “I consider this part of a crime scene,” he said. “It’s you who has to leave.”

  “Read the order, Detective. I’m not going anywhere. Your crime scene is out in the garage, and no judge in L.A. would let you extend it to this office and these files. It’s time for you to leave and for me to take care of my clients.”

  He made no move to read the court order or to vacate the premises.

  “If I leave,” he said, “I’m going to shut this place down and seal it.”

  I hated getting into pissing matches with cops but sometimes there was no choice.

  “You do that and I’ll have it unsealed in an hour. And you’ll be standing in front of the chief judge of the superior court explaining how you trampled on the rights of every one of Vincent’s clients. You know, depending on how many clients we’re talking about, that might be a record—even for the LAPD.”

  The detective smiled at me like he was mildly amused by my threats. He held up the court order.

  “You say this gives you all of these cases?”

  “That’s right, for now.”

  “The entire law practice?”

  “Yes, but each client will decide whether to stick with me or find someone else.”

  “Well, I guess that puts you on our list.”

  “What list?”

  “Our suspect list.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would I be on it?”

  “You just told us why. You inherited all of the victim’s clients. That’s got to amount to some sort of a financial windfall, doesn’t it? He’s dead and you get the whole business. Think that’s enough motivation for murder? Care to tell us where you were last night between eight and midnight?”

  He grinned at me again without any warmth, giving me that cop’s practiced smile of judgment. His brown eyes were so dark I couldn’t see the line between iris and pupil. Like shark eyes, they didn’t seem to carry or reflect any light.

  “I’m not even going to begin to explain how ludicrous that is,” I said. “But for starters you can check with the judge and you’ll find out that I didn’t even know I was in line for this.”

  “So you say. But don’t worry, we’ll be checking you out completely.”

  “Good. Now please leave this room or I make the call to the judge.”

  The detective stepped back to the table and took his jacket off the chair. He carried it rather than put it on. He picked a file up off the table and brought it toward me. He shoved it into my chest until I took it from him.

  “Here’s one of your new files back, Counselor. Don’t choke on it.”

  He stepped through the door, and his partner went with him. I followed them out into the office and decided to take a shot at reducing the tension. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last time I saw them.

  “Look, detectives, I’m sorry it’s like this. I try to have a good relationship with the police and I am sure we can work something out. But at the moment my obligation is to the clients. I don’t even know what I have here. Give me some time to—”

  “We don’t have time,” the older man said. “We lose momentum and we lose the case. Do you understand what you’re getting yourself into here, Counselor?”

  I looked at him for a moment, trying to understand the meaning behind his question.

  “I think so, Detective. I’ve only been working cases for about eighteen years but—”

  “I’m not talking about your experience. I’m talking about what happened in that garage. Whoever killed Vincent was waiting for him out there. They knew where he was and just how to get to him. He was ambushed.”

  I nodded like I understood.

  “If I were you,” the detective said, “I’d watch myself with those new clients of yours. Jerry Vincent knew his killer.”

  “What about when he was a prosecutor? He put people in prison. Maybe one of—”

  “We’ll check into it. But that was a long time ago. I think the person we’re looking for is in those files.”

  With that, he and his partner started moving toward the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “You have a card? Give me a card.”

  The detectives stopped and turned back. The older one pulled a card out of his pocket and gave it to me.

  “That’s got all my numbers.”

  “Let me just get the lay of the land here and then I’ll call and set something up. There’s got to be a way for us to cooperate and still not trample on anybody’s rights.”

  “Whatever you say, you’re the lawyer.”

  I nodded and looked down at the name on the card. Harry Bosch. I was sure I had never met the man before, yet he had started the confrontation by saying he knew who I was.

  “Look, Detective Bosch,” I said, “Jerry Vincent was a colleague. We weren’t that close but we were friends.”

  “And?”

  “And good luck, you know? With the case. I hope you crack it.”

  Bosch nodded and there was something familiar about the physical gesture. Maybe we did know each other.

  He turned to follow his partner out of the office.

  “Detective?”

  Bosch once more turned back to me.

  “Did we ever cross paths on a case before? I think I recognize you.”

  Bosch smiled glibly and shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “If we’d been on a case, you’d remember me.” />
  Seven

  An hour later I was behind Jerry Vincent’s desk with Lorna Taylor and Dennis Wojciehowski sitting across from me. We were eating our sandwiches and about to go over what we had put together from a very preliminary survey of the office and the cases. The food was good but nobody had much of an appetite considering where we were sitting and what had happened to the office’s predecessor.

  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 tread-mill, 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 go
t 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 dropped 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.”