The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

“It sort of reminds me of Jesus Menendez, only without DNA. Remember him?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to.”

  I tried not to think about clients who were in prison without appellate hopes or anything else left but years of time in front of them to nut out. I do what I can with each case but sometimes there is nothing that can be done. Jesus Menendez’s case was one of those.

  “How’s your time on this?” I asked, putting us back on course.

  “I’ve got a few things but I can move them around.”

  “You are going to have to work nights on this. I need you to go into those bars. I want to know everything about him and everything about her. This case looks simple at this point. We knock her down and we knock the case down.”

  Levin nodded. He had his briefcase on his lap.

  “You got your camera in there?”

  “Always.”

  “When we get to the house take some pictures of Roulet. I don’t want you showing his mug shot in the bars. It’ll taint things. Can you get a picture of the woman without her face being all messed up?”

  “I got her driver’s license photo. It’s recent.”

  “Good. Run them down. If we find a witness who saw her come over to him at the bar in Morgan’s last night, then we’re gold.”

  “That’s where I was thinking I’d start. Give me a week or so. I’ll come back to you before the arraignment.”

  I nodded. We drove in silence for a few minutes, thinking about the case. We were moving through the flats of Beverly Hills, heading up into the neighborhoods where the real money was hidden and waiting.

  “And you know what else I think?” I said. “Money and everything aside, I think there’s a chance he isn’t lying. His story is just quirky enough to be true.”

  Levin whistled softly between his teeth.

  “You think you might have found the innocent man?” he said.

  “That would be a first,” I said. “If I had only known it this morning, I would have charged him the innocent man premium. If you’re innocent you pay more because you’re a hell of a lot more trouble to defend.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  I thought about the idea of having an innocent client and the dangers involved.

  “You know what my father said about innocent clients?”

  “I thought your father died when you were like six years old.”

  “Five, actually. They didn’t even take me to the funeral.”

  “And he was talking to you about innocent clients when you were five?”

  “No, I read it in a book long after he was gone. He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it’ll scar you for life.”

  “He said it like that?”

  “Words to that effect. He said there is no in-between with an innocent client. No negotiation, no plea bargaining, no middle ground. There’s only one verdict. You have to put an NG up on the scoreboard. There’s no other verdict but not guilty.”

  Levin nodded thoughtfully.

  “The bottom line was my old man was a damn good lawyer and he didn’t like having innocent clients,” I said. “I’m not sure I do, either.”

  Thursday, March 17

  TEN

  The first ad I ever put in the yellow pages said “Any Case, Anytime, Anywhere” but I changed it after a few years. Not because the bar objected to it, but because I objected to it. I got more particular. Los Angeles County is a wrinkled blanket that covers four thousand square miles from the desert to the Pacific. There are more than ten million people fighting for space on the blanket and a considerable number of them engage in criminal activity as a lifestyle choice. The latest crime stats show almost a hundred thousand violent crimes are reported each year in the county. Last year there were 140,000 felony arrests and then another 50,000 high-end misdemeanor arrests for drug and sex offenses. Add in the DUIs and every year you could fill the Rose Bowl twice over with potential clients. The thing to remember is that you don’t want clients from the cheap seats. You want the ones sitting on the fifty-yard line. The ones with money in their pockets.

  When the criminals get caught they get funneled into a justice system that has more than forty courthouses spread across the county like Burger Kings ready to serve them — as in serve them up on a plate. These stone fortresses are the watering holes where the legal lions come to hunt and to feed. And the smart hunter learns quickly where the most bountiful locations are, where the paying clients graze. The hunt can be deceptive. The client base of each courthouse does not necessarily reflect the socioeconomic structure of the surrounding environs. Courthouses in Compton, Downey and East Los Angeles have produced a steady line of paying clients for me. These clients are usually accused of being drug dealers but their money is just as green as a Beverly Hills stock swindler’s.

  On the morning of the seventeenth I was in the Compton courthouse representing Darius McGinley at his sentencing. Repeat offenders mean repeat customers and McGinley was both, as many of my clients tend to be. For the sixth time since I had known him, he had been arrested and charged with dealing crack cocaine. This time it was in Nickerson Gardens, a housing project known by most of its residents as Nixon Gardens. No one I ever asked knew whether this was an abbreviation of the true name of the place or a name bestowed in honor of the president who held office when the vast apartment complex and drug market was built. McGinley was arrested after making a direct hand-to-hand sale of a balloon containing a dozen rocks to an undercover narcotics officer. At the time, he had been out on bail after being arrested for the exact same offense two months earlier. He also had four prior convictions for drug sales on his record.

  Things didn’t look good for McGinley, who was only twenty-three years old. After he’d taken so many previous swings at the system, the system had now run out of patience with him. The hammer was coming down. Though McGinley had been coddled previously with sentences of probation and county jail time, the prosecutor set the bar at the prison level this time. Any negotiation of a plea agreement would begin and end with a prison sentence. Otherwise, no deal. The prosecutor was happy to take the two outstanding cases to trial and go for a conviction and a double-digit prison sentence.

  The choice was hard but simple. The state held all of the cards. They had him cold on two hand-to-hand sales with quantity. The reality was that a trial would be an exercise in futility. McGinley knew this. The reality was that his selling of three hundred dollars in rock cocaine to a cop was going to cost him at least three years of his life.

  As with many of my young male clients from the south side of the city, prison was an anticipated part of life for McGinley. He grew up knowing he was going. The only questions were when and for how long and whether he would live long enough to make it there. In my many jailhouse meetings with him over the years, I had learned that McGinley carried a personal philosophy inspired by the life and death and rap music of Tupac Shakur, the thug poet whose rhymes carried the hope and hopelessness of the desolate streets McGinley called home. Tupac correctly prophesied his own violent death. South L.A. teemed with young men who carried the exact same vision.

  McGinley was one of them. He would recite to me long riffs from Tupac’s CDs. He would translate the meanings of the ghetto lyrics for me. It was an education I valued because McGinley was only one of many clients with a shared belief in a final destiny that was “Thug Mansion,” the place between heaven and earth where all gangsters ended up. To McGinley, prison was only a rite of passage on the road to that place and he was ready to make the journey.

  “I’ll lay up, get stronger and smarter, then I’ll be back,” he said to me.

  He told me to go ahead and make a deal. He had five thousand dollars delivered to me in a money order — I didn’t ask where it came from — and I went back to the prosecutor, got both pending cases folded into one, and McGinley agreed to plead guilty. The only thing he ever asked me to try to get for him wa
s an assignment to a prison close by so his mother and his three young children wouldn’t have to be driven too far or too long to visit him.

  When court was called into session, Judge Daniel Flynn came through the door of his chambers in an emerald green robe, which brought false smiles from many of the lawyers and court workers in the room. He was known to wear the green on two occasions each year — St. Patrick’s Day and the Friday before the Notre Dame Fighting Irish took on the Southern Cal Trojans on the football field. He was also known among the lawyers who worked the Compton courthouse as “Danny Boy,” as in, “Danny Boy sure is an insensitive Irish prick, isn’t he?”

  The clerk called the case and I stepped up and announced. McGinley was brought in through a side door and stood next to me in an orange jumpsuit with his wrists locked to a waist chain. He had no one out in the gallery to watch him go down. He was alone except for me.

  “Top o’ the morning to you, Mr. McGinley,” Flynn said in an Irish brogue. “You know what today is?”

  I lowered my eyes to the floor. McGinley mumbled his response.

  “The day I get my sentence.”

  “That, too. But I am talking about St. Patrick’s Day, Mr. McGinley. A day to revel in Irish heritage.”

  McGinley turned slightly and looked at me. He was street smart but not life smart. He didn’t understand what was happening, whether this was part of the sentencing or just some form of white man disrespect. I wanted to tell him that the judge was being insensitive and probably racist. Instead I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Just be cool. He’s an asshole.”

  “Do you know the origin of your name, Mr. McGinley?” the judge asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not really, sir. It’s a name from a slaveholder, I ’spect. Why would I care who that motherfucka be?”

  “Excuse me, Your Honor,” I said quickly.

  I leaned over to McGinley again.

  “Darius, cool it,” I whispered. “And watch your language.”

  “He’s dissing me,” he said back, a little louder than a whisper.

  “And he hasn’t sentenced you yet. You want to blow the deal?”

  McGinley stepped back from me and looked up at the judge.

  “Sorry about my language, Y’Honor. I come from the street.”

  “I can tell that,” Flynn said. “Well, it is a shame you feel that way about your history. But if you don’t care about your name, then I don’t either. Let’s get on with the sentencing and get you off to prison, shall we?”

  He said the last part cheerfully, as if he were taking great delight in sending McGinley off to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth.

  The sentencing went by quickly after that. There was nothing in the presentencing investigation report besides what everybody already knew. Darius McGinley had had only one profession since age eleven, drug dealer. He’d had only one true family, a gang. He’d never gotten a driver’s license, though he drove a BMW He’d never gotten married, though he’d fathered three babies. It was the same old story and same old cycle trotted out a dozen times a day in courtrooms across the county. McGinley lived in a society that intersected mainstream America only in the courtrooms. He was just fodder for the machine. The machine needed to eat and McGinley was on the plate. Flynn sentenced him to the agreed-upon three to five years in prison and read all of the standard legal language that came with a plea agreement. For laughs — though only his own courtroom staff complied — he read the boilerplate using his brogue again. And then it was over.

  I know McGinley dealt death and destruction in the form of rock cocaine and probably committed untold violence and other offenses he was never charged with, but I still felt bad for him. I felt like he was another one who’d never had a shot at anything but thug life in the first place. He’d never known his father and had dropped out of school in the sixth grade to learn the rock trade. He could accurately count money in a rock house but he had never had a checking account. He had never been to a county beach, let alone outside of Los Angeles. And now his first trip out would be on a bus with bars over the windows.

  Before he was led back into the holding cell for processing and transfer to prison I shook his hand, his movement restricted by the waist chain, and wished him good luck. It is something I rarely do with my clients.

  “No sweat,” he said to me. “I’ll be back.”

  And I didn’t doubt it. In a way, Darius McGinley was just as much a franchise client as Louis Roulet. Roulet was most likely a one-shot deal. But over the years, I had a feeling McGinley would be one of what I call my “annuity clients.” He would be the gift that would keep on giving — as long as he defied the odds and kept on living.

  I put the McGinley file in my briefcase and headed back through the gate while the next case was called. Outside the courtroom Raul Levin was waiting for me in the crowded hallway. We had a scheduled meeting to go over his findings in the Roulet case. He’d had to come to Compton because I had a busy schedule.

  “Top o’ the morning,” Levin said in an exaggerated Irish accent.

  “Yeah, you saw that?”

  “I stuck my head in. The guy’s a bit of a racist, isn’t he?”

  “And he can get away with it because ever since they unified the courts into one countywide district, his name goes on the ballot everywhere. Even if the people of Compton rose up like a wave to vote him off, the Westsiders could still cancel them out. It’s fucked up.”

  “How’d he get on the bench in the first place?”

  “Hey, you get a law degree and make the right contributions to the right people and you could be a judge, too. He was appointed by the governor. The hard part is winning that first retention election. He did. You’ve never heard the ‘In like Flynn’ story?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’ll love it. About six years ago Flynn gets his appointment from the governor. This is before unification. Back then judges were elected by the voters of the district where they presided. The supervising judge for L.A. County checks out his credentials and pretty quickly realizes that he’s got a guy with lots of political connections but no talent or courthouse experience to go with it. Flynn was basically an office lawyer. Probably couldn’t find a courthouse, let alone try a case, if you paid him. So the presiding judge dumps him down here in Compton criminal because the rule is you have to run for retention the year after being appointed to the bench. He figures Flynn will fuck up, anger the folks and get voted out. One year and out.”

  “Headache over.”

  “Exactly. Only it didn’t work that way. In the first hour on the first day of filing for the ballot that year, Fredrica Brown walks into the clerk’s office and puts in her papers to run against Flynn. You know Downtown Freddie Brown?”

  “Not personally. I know of her.”

  “So does everybody else around here. Besides being a pretty good defense lawyer, she’s black, she’s a woman and she’s popular in the community. She would have crushed Flynn five to one or better.”

  “Then how the hell did Flynn keep the seat?”

  “That’s what I’m getting to. With Freddie on the ballot, nobody else filed to run. Why bother, she was a shoo-in — though it was kind of curious why she’d want to be a judge and take the pay cut. Back then she had to have been well into mid six figures with her practice.”

  “So what happened?”

  “What happened was, a couple months later on the last hour before filing closed, Freddie walks back into the clerk’s office and withdraws from the ballot.”

  Levin nodded.

  “So Flynn ends up running unopposed and keeps the seat,” he said.

  “You got it. Then unification comes in and they’ll never be able to get him out of there.”

  Levin looked outraged.

  “That’s bullshit. They had some kind of deal and that’s gotta be a violation of election laws.”

  “Only if you could prove there was a deal. Freddie h
as always maintained that she wasn’t paid off or part of some plan Flynn cooked up to stay on the bench. She says she just changed her mind and pulled out because she realized she couldn’t sustain her lifestyle on a judge’s pay. But I’ll tell you one thing, Freddie sure seems to do well whenever she has a case in front of Flynn.”

  “And they call it a justice system.”

  “Yeah, they do.”

  “So what do you think about Blake?”

  It had to be brought up. It was all anybody else was talking about. Robert Blake, the movie and television actor, had been acquitted of murdering his wife the day before in Van Nuys Superior Court. The DA and the LAPD had lost another big media case and you couldn’t go anywhere without it being the number one topic of discussion. The media and most people who lived and worked outside the machine didn’t get it. The question wasn’t whether Blake did it, but whether there was enough evidence presented in trial to convict him of doing it. They were two distinctly separate things but the public discourse that had followed the verdict had entwined them.

  “What do I think?” I said. “I think I admire the jury for staying focused on the evidence. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there. I hate it when the DA thinks they can ride in a verdict on common sense — ‘If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been?’ Give me a break with that. You want to convict a man and put him in a cage for life, then put up the fucking evidence. Don’t hope a jury is going to bail your ass out on it.”

  “Spoken like a true defense attorney.”

  “Hey, you make your living off defense attorneys, pal. You should memorize that rap. So forget Blake. I’m jealous and I’m already tired of hearing about it. You said on the phone that you had good news for me.”

  “I do. Where do you want to go to talk and look at what I’ve got?”

  I looked at my watch. I had a calendar call on a case in the Criminal Courts Building downtown. I had until eleven to be there and I couldn’t miss it because I had missed it the day before. After that I was supposed to go up to Van Nuys to meet for the first time with Ted Minton, the prosecutor who had taken the Roulet case over from Maggie McPherson.