THE LINCOLN LAWYER (2005)

by Michael Connelly

  "That's how she said it. She was upset and hurt at the time."

  "I understand. Did she tell you who the man was?"

  "No, she said she didn't know the man."

  "You specifically asked if she knew the man?"

  "Yes. She said no."

  "So she just opened her door at ten o'clock at night to a stranger."

  "She didn't say it that way."

  "But you said she told you she didn't know him, right?"

  "That is correct. That is how she said it. She said, 'I don't know who he is.'"

  "And did you put this in your report?"

  "Yes, I did."

  I introduced the patrol officer's report as a defense exhibit and had Maxwell read parts of it to the jury. These parts involved Campo saying that the attack was unprovoked and at the hands of a stranger.

  "'The victim does not know the man who assaulted her and did not know why she was attacked,'" she read from her own report.

  Maxwell's partner, John Santos, testified next, telling jurors that Campo directed him to her apartment, where he found a man on the floor near the entrance. The man was semiconscious and was being held on the ground by two of Campo's neighbors, Edward Turner and Ronald Atkins. One man was straddling the man's chest and the other was sitting on his legs.

  Santos identified the man being held on the floor as the defendant, Louis Ross Roulet. Santos described him as having blood on his clothes and his left hand. He said Roulet appeared to be suffering from a concussion or some sort of head injury and initially was not responsive to commands. Santos turned him over and handcuffed his hands behind his back. The officer then put a plastic evidence bag he carried in a compartment on his belt over Roulet's bloody hand.

  Santos testified that one of the men who had been holding Roulet handed over a folding knife that was open and had blood on its handle and blade. Santos told jurors he bagged this item as well and turned it over to Detective Martin Booker as soon as he arrived on the scene.

  On cross-examination I asked Santos only two questions.

  "Officer, was there blood on the defendant's right hand?"

  "No, there was no blood on his right hand or I would have bagged that one, too."

  "I see. So you have blood on the left hand only and a knife with blood on the handle. Would it then appear to you that if the defendant had held that knife, then he would have to have held it in his left hand?"

  Minton objected, saying that Santos was a patrol officer and that the question was beyond the scope of his expertise. I argued that the question required only a commonsense answer, not an expert. The judge overruled the objection and the court clerk read the question back to the witness.

  "It would seem that way to me," Santos answered.

  Arthur Metz was the paramedic who testified next. He told jurors about Campo's demeanor and the extent of her injuries when he treated her less than thirty minutes after the attack. He said that it appeared to him that she had suffered at least three significant impacts to the face. He also described a small puncture wound to her neck. He described all the injuries as superficial but painful. A large blowup of the same photograph of Campo's face I had seen on the first day I was on the case was displayed on an easel in front of the jury. I objected to this, arguing that the photo was prejudicial because it had been blown up to larger-than-life size, but I was overruled by Judge Fullbright.

  Then, when it was my turn to cross-examine Metz, I used the photo I had just objected to.

  "When you tell us that it appeared that she suffered at least three impacts to the face, what do you mean by 'impact'?" I asked.

  "She was struck with something. Either a fist or a blunt object."

  "So basically someone hit her three times. Could you please use this laser pointer and show the jury on the photograph where these impacts occurred."

  From my shirt pocket I unclipped a laser pointer and held it up for the judge to see. She granted me permission to carry it to Metz. I turned it on and handed it to him. He then put the red eye of the laser beam on the photo of Campo's battered face and drew circles in the three areas where he believed she had been struck. He circled her right eye, her right cheek and an area encompassing the right side of her mouth and nose.

  "Thank you," I said, taking the laser back from him and returning to the lectern. "So if she was hit three times on the right side of her face, the impacts would have come from the left side of her attacker, correct?"

  Minton objected, once more saying the question was beyond the scope of the witness's expertise. Once more I argued common sense and once more the judge overruled the prosecutor.

  "If the attacker was facing her, he would have punched her from the left, unless it was a backhand," Metz said. "Then it could have been a right."

  He nodded and seemed pleased with himself. He obviously thought he was helping the prosecution but his effort was so disingenuous that he was actually probably helping the defense.

  "You are suggesting that Ms. Campo's attacker hit her three times with a backhand and caused this degree of injury?"

  I pointed to the photo on the exhibit easel. Metz shrugged, realizing he had probably not been so helpful to the prosecution.

  "Anything is possible," he said.

  "Anything is possible," I repeated. "Well, is there any other possibility you can think of that would explain these injuries as coming from anything other than direct left-handed punches?"

  Metz shrugged again. He was not an impressive witness, especially following two cops and a dispatcher who had been very precise in their testimony.

  "What if Ms. Campo were to have hit her face with her own fist? Wouldn't she have used her right -"

  Minton jumped up immediately and objected.

  "Your Honor, this is outrageous! To suggest that this victim did this to herself is not only an affront to this court but to all victims of violent crime everywhere. Mr. Haller has sunk to -"

  "The witness said anything is possible," I argued, trying to knock Minton off the soapbox. "I am trying to explore what -"

  "Sustained," Fullbright said, ending it. "Mr. Haller, don't go there unless you are making more than an exploratory swing through the possibilities."

  "Yes, Your Honor," I said. "No further questions."

  I sat down and glanced at the jurors and knew from their faces that I had made a mistake. I had turned a positive cross into a negative. The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim's face were self-inflicted. The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.

  Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury's feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.

  Roulet leaned toward me and whispered, "What the fuck was that?"

  Without responding I turned my back to him and took a scan around the courtroom. It was almost empty. Lankford and Sobel had not returned to the courtroom and the reporters were gone as well. That left only a few other onlookers. They appeared to be a disparate collection of retirees, law students and lawyers resting their feet until their own hearings began in other courtrooms. But I was counting on one of these onlookers being a plant from the DA's office. Ted Minton might be flying solo but my guess was that his boss would have a means of keeping tabs on him and the case. I knew I was playing as much to the plant as I was to the jury. By the trial's end I needed to send a note of panic down to the second floor that would then echo back to Minton. I needed to push the young prosecutor toward taking a desperate measure.

  The afternoon dragged on. Minton still had a lot to learn about pacing and jury management, knowledge that comes only with courtroom experience. I kept my eyes on the jury box-where the real judges sat-and saw the jurors were growing bored as witness after witness offered testimony that filled in small details in the prosecutor's linear presentation of the events of March 6. I asked few questions on cross and tried
to keep a look on my face that mirrored those I saw in the jury box.

  Minton obviously wanted to save his most powerful stuff for day two. He would have the lead investigator, Detective Martin Booker, to bring all the details together, and then the victim, Regina Campo, to bring it all home to the jury. It was a tried-and-true formula-ending with muscle and emotion-and it worked ninety percent of the time, but it was making the first day move like a glacier.

  Things finally started to pop with the last witness of the day. Minton brought in Charles Talbot, the man who had picked up Regina Campo at Morgan's and gone with her to her apartment on the night of the sixth. What Talbot had to offer to the prosecution's case was negligible. He was basically hauled in to testify that Campo had been in good health and uninjured when he left her. That was it. But what caused his arrival to rescue the trial from the pit of boredom was that Talbot was an honest-to-God alternate lifestyle man and jurors always loved visiting the other side of the tracks.

  Talbot was fifty-five years old with dyed blond hair that wasn't fooling anyone. He had blurred Navy tattoos on both forearms. He was twenty years divorced and owned a twenty-four-hour convenience store called Kwik Kwik. The business gave him a comfortable living and lifestyle with an apartment in the Warner Center, a late-model Corvette and a nightlife that included a wide sampling of the city's professional sex providers.

  Minton established all of this in the early stages of his direct examination. You could almost feel the air go still in the courtroom as the jurors plugged into Talbot. The prosecutor then brought him quickly to the night of March 6, and Talbot described hooking up with Reggie Campo at Morgan's on Ventura Boulevard

  .

  "Did you know Ms. Campo before you met her in the bar that night?"

  "No, I did not."

  "How did it come about that you met her there?"

  "I just called her up and said I wanted to get together with her and she suggested we meet at Morgan's. I knew the place, so I said sure."

  "And how did you call her up?"

  "With the telephone."

  Several jurors laughed.

  "I'm sorry. I understand that you used a telephone to call her. I meant how did you knowhow to contact her?"

  "I saw her ad on the website and I liked what I saw and so I went ahead and called her up and we made a date. It's as simple as that. Her number is on her website ad."

  "And you met at Morgan's."

  "Yes, that's where she meets her dates, she told me. So I went there and we had a couple drinks and we talked and we liked each other and that was that. I followed her back to her place."

  "When you went to her apartment did you engage in sexual relations?"

  "Sure did. That's what I was there for."

  "And you paid her?"

  "Four hundred bucks. It was worth it."

  I saw a male juror's face turning red and I knew I had pegged him perfectly during selection the week before. I had wanted him because he had brought a Bible with him to read while other prospective jurors were being questioned. Minton had missed it, focusing only on the candidates as they were being questioned. But I had seen the Bible and asked few questions of the man when it was his turn. Minton accepted him on the jury and so did I. I figured he would be easy to turn against the victim because of her occupation. His reddening face confirmed it.

  "What time did you leave her apartment?" Minton asked.

  "About five minutes before ten," Talbot answered.

  "Did she tell you she was expecting another date at the apartment?"

  "No, she didn't say anything about that. In fact, she was sort of acting like she was done for the night."

  I stood up and objected.

  "I don't think Mr. Talbot is qualified here to interpret what Ms. Campo was thinking or planning by her actions."

  "Sustained," the judge said before Minton could offer an argument.

  The prosecutor moved right along.

  "Mr. Talbot, could you please describe the physical state Ms. Campo was in when you left her shortly before ten o'clock on the night of March sixth?"

  "Completely satisfied."

  There was a loud blast of laughter in the courtroom and Talbot beamed proudly. I checked the Bible man and it looked like his jaw was tightly clenched.

  "Mr. Talbot," Minton said. "I mean her physical state. Was she hurt or bleeding when you left her?"

  "No, she was fine. She was okay. When I left her she was fit as a fiddle and I know because I had just played her."

  He smiled, proud of his use of language. This time there was no laughter and the judge had finally had enough of his use of the double entendre. She admonished him to keep his more off-color remarks to himself.

  "Sorry, Judge," he said.

  "Mr. Talbot," Minton said. "Ms. Campo was not injured in any way when you left her?"

  "Nope. No way."

  "She wasn't bleeding?"

  "No."

  "And you didn't strike her or physically abuse her in any way?"

  "No again. What we did was consensual and pleasurable. No pain."

  "Thank you, Mr. Talbot."

  I looked at my notes for a few moments before standing up. I wanted a break of time to clearly mark the line between direct and cross-examination.

  "Mr. Haller?" the judge prompted. "Do you wish to cross-examine the witness?"

  I stood up and moved to the lectern.

  "Yes, Your Honor, I do."

  I put my pad down and looked directly at Talbot. He was smiling pleasantly at me but I knew he wouldn't like me for very long.

  "Mr. Talbot, are you right- or left-handed?"

  "I'm left-handed."

  "Left-handed," I echoed. "And isn't it true that on the night of the sixth, before leaving Regina Campo's apartment, she asked you to strike her with your fist repeatedly in the face?"

  Minton stood up.

  "Your Honor, there is no basis for this sort of questioning. Mr. Haller is simply trying to muddy the waters by taking outrageous statements and turning them into questions."

  The judge looked at me and waited for a response.

  "Judge, it is part of the defense theory as outlined in my opening statement."

  "I am going to allow it. Just be quick about it, Mr. Haller."

  The question was read to Talbot and he smirked and shook his head.

  "That is not true. I've never hurt a woman in my life."

  "You struck her with your fist three times, didn't you, Mr. Talbot?"

  "No, I did not. That is a lie."

  "You said you have never hurt a woman in your life."

  "That's right. Never."

  "Do you know a prostitute named Shaquilla Barton?"

  Talbot had to think before answering.

  "Doesn't ring a bell."

  "On the website where she advertises her services she uses the name Shaquilla Shackles. Does that ring a bell now, Mr. Talbot?"

  "Okay, yeah, I think so."

  "Have you ever engaged in acts of prostitution with her?"

  "One time, yes."

  "When was that?"

  "Would've been at least a year ago. Maybe longer."

  "And did you hurt her on that occasion?"

  "No."

  "And if she were to come to this courtroom and say that you did hurt her by punching her with your left hand, would she be lying?"

  "She damn sure would be. I tried her out and didn't like that rough stuff. I'm strictly a missionary man. I didn't touch her."

  "You didn't touch her?"

  "I mean I didn't punch her or hurt her in any way."

  "Thank you, Mr. Talbot."

  I sat down. Minton did not bother with a redirect. Talbot was excused and Minton told the judge that he had only two witnesses remaining to present in the case but that their testimony would be lengthy. Judge Fullbright checked the time and recessed court for the day.

  Two witnesses left. I knew that had to be Detective Booker and Reggie Campo. It looked like Minton was
going to go without the testimony of the jailhouse snitch he had stashed in the PTI program at County-USC. Dwayne Corliss's name had never appeared on any witness list or any other discovery document associated with the prosecution of the case. I thought maybe Minton had found out what Raul Levin had found out about Corliss before Raul was murdered. Either way, it seemed apparent that Corliss had been dropped by the prosecution. And that was what I needed to change.