The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  By the time I got through the city and over the Golden Gate it was almost two. I was in good shape. I knew from past experience that attorney visiting hours ended at four.

  San Quentin is over a century old and looks as though the soul of every prisoner who lived or died there is etched on its dark walls. It was as foreboding a prison as I had ever visited, and at one time or another I had been to every one in California.

  They searched my briefcase and made me go through a metal detector. After that they still passed a wand over me to make extra sure. Even then I wasn’t allowed direct contact with Menendez because I had not formally scheduled the interview the required five days in advance. So I was put in a no-contact room — a Plexiglas wall between us with dime-size holes to speak through. I showed the guard the six-pack of photos I wanted to give Menendez and he told me I would have to show him the pictures through the Plexiglas. I sat down, put the photos away and didn’t have to wait long until they brought Menendez in on the other side of the glass.

  Two years ago, when he was shipped off to prison, Jesus Menendez had been a young man. Now he looked like he was already the forty years old I told him he could beat if he pleaded guilty. He looked at me with eyes as dead as the gravel stones out in the parking lot. He saw me and sat down reluctantly. He didn’t have much use for me anymore.

  We didn’t bother with hellos and I got right into it.

  “Look, Jesus, I don’t have to ask you how you’ve been. I know. But something’s come up and it could affect your case. I need to ask you a few questions. You understand me?”

  “Why questions now, man? You had no questions before.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re right. I should’ve asked you more questions back then and I didn’t. I didn’t know then what I know now. Or at least what I think I know now. I am trying to make things right.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to tell me about that night at The Cobra Room.”

  He shrugged.

  “The girl was there and I talked. She tol’ me to follow her home.”

  He shrugged again.

  “I went to her place, man, but I didn’t kill her like that.”

  “Go back to the club. You told me that you had to impress the girl, that you had to show her the money and you spent more than you wanted to. You remember?”

  “Is right.”

  “You said there was another guy trying to get with her. You remember that?”

  “Si, he was there talking. She went to him but she came back to me.”

  “You had to pay her more, right?”

  “Like that.”

  “Okay, do you remember that guy? If you saw a picture of him, would you remember him?”

  “The guy who talked big? I think I’member.”

  “Okay.”

  I opened my briefcase and took out the spread of mug shots. There were six photos and they included the booking photo of Louis Ross Roulet and five other men whose mug shots I had culled out of my archive boxes. I stood up and one by one started holding them up on the glass. I thought that by spreading my fingers I would be able to hold all six against the glass. Menendez stood up to look closely at the photos.

  Almost immediately a voice boomed from an overhead speaker.

  “Step back from the glass. Both of you step back from the glass and remain seated or the interview will be terminated.”

  I shook my head and cursed. I gathered the photos together and sat down. Menendez sat back down as well.

  “Guard!” I said loudly.

  I looked at Menendez and waited. The guard didn’t enter the room.

  “Guard!” I called again, louder.

  Finally, the door opened and the guard stepped into my side of the interview room.

  “You done?”

  “No. I need him to look at these photos.”

  I held up the stack.

  “Show him through the glass. He’s not allowed to receive anything from you.”

  “But I’m going to take them right back.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You can’t give him anything.”

  “But if you don’t let him come to the glass, how is he going to see them?”

  “It’s not my problem.”

  I waved in surrender.

  “All right, okay. Then can you stay here for a minute?”

  “What for?”

  “I want you to watch this. I’m going to show him the photos and if he makes an ID, I want you to witness it.”

  “Don’t drag me into your bullshit.”

  He walked to the door and left.

  “Goddamn it,” I said.

  I looked at Menendez.

  “All right, Jesus, I’m going to show you, anyway. See if you recognize any of them from where you are sitting.”

  One by one I held the photos up about a foot from the glass. Menendez leaned forward. As I showed each of the first five he looked, thought about it and then shook his head no. But on the sixth photo I saw his eyes flare. It seemed as though there was some life in them after all.

  “That one,” he said. “Is him.”

  I turned the photo toward me to be sure. It was Roulet. “I’member,” Menendez said. “He’s the one.”

  “And you’re sure?”

  Menendez nodded.

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I know. In here I think on that night all of my time.”

  I nodded.

  “Who is the man?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you right now. Just know that I am trying to get you out of here.”

  “What do I do?”

  “What you have been doing. Sit tight, be careful and stay safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “I know. But as soon as I have something, you will know about it. I’m trying to get you out of here, Jesus, but it might take a little while.”

  “You were the one who tol’ me to come here.”

  “At the time I didn’t think there was a choice.”

  “How come you never ask me, did you murder this girl? You my lawyer, man. You din’t care. You din’t listen.”

  I stood up and loudly called for the guard. Then I answered his question.

  “To legally defend you I didn’t need to know the answer to that question. If I asked my clients if they were guilty of the crimes they were charged with, very few would tell me the truth. And if they did, I might not be able to defend them to the best of my ability.”

  The guard opened the door and looked in at me.

  “I’m ready to go,” I said.

  I checked my watch and figured that if I was lucky in traffic I might be able to catch the five o‘clock shuttle back to Burbank. The six o’clock at the latest. I dropped the photos into my briefcase and closed it. I looked back at Menendez, who was still in his chair on the other side of the glass.

  “Can I just put my hand on the glass?” I asked the guard.

  “Hurry up.”

  I leaned across the counter and put my hand on the glass, fingers spread. I waited for Menendez to do the same, creating a jailhouse handshake.

  Menendez stood, leaned forward and spit on the glass where my hand was.

  “You never shake my hand,” he said. “I don’t shake yours.”

  I nodded. I thought I understood just where he was coming from.

  The guard smirked and told me to step through the door. In ten minutes I was out of the prison and crunching across the gravel to my rental car.

  I had come four hundred miles for five minutes but those minutes were devastating. I think the lowest point of my life and professional career came an hour later when I was on the rent-a-car train being delivered back to the United terminal. No longer concentrating on the driving and making it back in time, I had only the case to think about. Cases, actually.

  I leaned down, elbows on my knees and my face in my hands. My greatest fear had been realized, realized for two years but I hadn’t known it. Not until now. I had b
een presented with innocence but I had not seen it or grasped it. Instead, I had thrown it into the maw of the machine like everything else. Now it was a cold, gray innocence, as dead as gravel and hidden in a fortress of stone and steel. And I had to live with it.

  There was no solace to be found in the alternative, the knowledge that had we rolled the dice and gone to trial, Jesus would likely be on death row right now. There could be no comfort in knowing that fate was avoided, because I knew as sure as I knew anything else in the world that Jesus Menendez had been innocent. Something as rare as a true miracle — an innocent man — had come to me and I hadn’t recognized it. I had turned away.

  “Bad day?”

  I looked up. There was a man across from me and a little bit further down the train car. We were the only ones on this link. He looked to be a decade older and had receding hair that made him look wise. Maybe he was even a lawyer, but I wasn’t interested.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.”

  And I held up a hand, palm out, a signal that I did not want conversation. I usually travel with a set of earbuds like Earl uses. I put them in and run the wire into a jacket pocket. It connects with nothing but it keeps people from talking to me. I had been in too much of a hurry this morning to think about them. Too much of a hurry to reach this point of desolation.

  The man across the train got the message and said nothing else. I went back to my dark thoughts about Jesus Menendez. The bottom line was that I believed that I had one client who was guilty of the murder another client was serving a life sentence for. I could not help one without hurting the other. I needed an answer. I needed a plan. I needed proof. But for the moment on the train, I could only think of Jesus Menendez’s dead eyes, because I knew I was the one who had killed the light in them.

  TWENTY

  As soon as I got off the shuttle at Burbank I turned on my cell. I had not come up with a plan but I had come up with my next step and that started with a call to Raul Levin. The phone buzzed in my hand, which meant I had messages. I decided I would get them after I set Levin in motion.

  He answered my call and the first thing he asked was whether I had gotten his message.

  “I just got off a plane,” I said. “I missed it.”

  “A plane? Where were you?”

  “Up north. What was the message?”

  “Just an update on Corliss. If you weren’t calling about that, what were you calling about?”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Just hanging out. I don’t like going out on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s amateur hour. Too many drunks on the road.”

  “Well, I want to meet. I’ve got to talk to somebody. Bad things are happening.”

  Levin apparently sensed something in my voice because he immediately changed his stay-at-home-on-Friday-night policy and we agreed to meet at the Smoke House over by the Warner Studios. It was not far from where I was and not far from his home.

  At the airport valet window I gave my ticket to a man in a red jacket and checked messages while waiting for the Lincoln.

  Three messages had come in, all during the hour flight down from San Francisco. The first was from Maggie McPherson.

  “Michael, I just wanted to call and say I’m sorry about how I was this morning. To tell you the truth, I was mad at myself for some of the things I said last night and the choices I made. I took it out on you and I should not have done that. Um, if you want to take Hayley out tomorrow or Sunday she would love it and, who knows, maybe I could come, too. Either way, just let me know.”

  She didn’t call me Michael too often, even when we were married. She was one of those women who could use your last name and turn it into an endearment. That is, if she wanted to. She had always called me Haller. From the day we met in line to go through a metal detector at the CCB. She was headed to orientation at the DA’s office and I was headed to misdemeanor arraignment court to handle a DUI.

  I saved the message to listen to again sometime and went on to the next. I was expecting it to be from Levin but the automated voice reported the call came from a number with a 310 area code. The next voice I heard was Louis Roulet’s.

  “It’s me, Louis. I was just checking in. I was just wondering after yesterday where things stood. I also have something I want to tell you.”

  I hit the erase button and moved on to the third and last message. This was Levin’s.

  “Hey, Bossman, give me a call. I have some stuff on Corliss. Anyway, the name is Dwayne Jeffery Corliss. That’s Dwayne with a D-W. He’s a hype and he’s done the snitch thing a couple other times here in L.A. What’s new, right? Anyway, he was actually arrested for stealing a bike he probably planned to trade for a little Mexican tar. He has parlayed snitching off Roulet into a ninety-day lockdown program at County-USC. So we won’t be able to get to him and talk to him unless you got a judge that will set it up. Pretty shrewd move by the prosecutor. Anyway, I’m still running him down. Something came up on the Internet in Phoenix that looks pretty good for us if it was the same guy. Something that blew up in his face. I should be able to confirm it by Monday. So that’s it for now. Give me a call over the weekend. I’m just hanging out.”

  I erased the message and closed the phone.

  “Say no more,” I said to myself.

  Once I heard that Corliss was a hype, I needed to know nothing else. I understood why Maggie had not trusted the guy. Hypes — needle addicts — were the most desperate and unreliable people you could come across in the machine. Given the opportunity, they would snitch off their own mothers to get the next injection, or into the next methadone program. Every one of them was a liar and every one of them could easily be shown as such in court.

  I was, however, puzzled by what the prosecutor was up to. The name Dwayne Corliss was not in the discovery material Minton had given me. Yet the prosecutor was making the moves he would make with a witness. He had stuck Corliss into a ninety-day program for safekeeping. The Roulet trial would come and go in that time. Was he hiding Corliss? Or was he simply putting the snitch on a shelf in the closet so he would know exactly where he was and where he’d been in case the time came in trial that his testimony would be needed? He was obviously operating under the belief that I didn’t know about Corliss. And if it hadn’t been for a slip by Maggie McPherson, I wouldn’t. It was still a dangerous move, nevertheless. Judges do not look kindly on prosecutors who so openly flout the rules of discovery.

  It led me to thinking of a possible strategy for the defense. If Minton was foolish enough to try to spring Corliss in trial, I might not even object under the rules of discovery. I might let him put the heroin addict on the stand so I would get the chance to shred him in front of the jury like a credit card receipt. It would all depend on what Levin could come up with. I planned to tell him to continue to dig into Dwayne Jeffery Corliss. To hold nothing back.

  I also thought about Corliss being in a lockdown program at County-USC. Levin was wrong and so was Minton if he was thinking I couldn’t reach his witness in lockdown. By coincidence, my client Gloria Dayton had been placed in a lockdown program at County-USC after she snitched off her drug-dealing client. While there were a number of such programs at County, it was likely that she shared group therapy sessions or even mealtime with Corliss. I might not be able to get directly to Corliss but as Dayton’s attorney I could get to her, and she in turn could get a message to Corliss.

  The Lincoln pulled up and I gave the man in the red jacket a couple dollars. I exited the airport and drove south on Hollywood Way toward the center of Burbank, where all the studios were. I got to the Smoke House ahead of Levin and ordered a martini at the bar. On the overhead TV was an update on the start of the college basketball tournament. Florida had defeated Ohio in the first round. The headline on the bottom of the screen said “March Madness” and I toasted my glass to it. I knew what real March Madness was beginning to feel like.

  Levin came in and ordered a beer before we sat down to dinner. It
was still green, left over from the night before. Must have been a slow night. Maybe everybody had gone to Four Green Fields.

  “Nothing like hair of the dog that bit ya, as long as it’s green hair,” he said in that brogue that was getting old.

  He sipped the level of the glass down so he could walk with it and we stepped out to the hostess station so we could go to a table. She led us to a red padded booth that was shaped like a U. We sat across from each other and I put my briefcase down next to me. When the waitress came for a cocktail order we ordered the whole shooting match: salads, steaks and potatoes. I also asked for an order of the restaurant’s signature garlic cheese bread.

  “Good thing you don’t like going out on weekends,” I said to Levin after she was gone. “You eat the cheese bread and your breath will probably kill anybody you come in contact with after this.”

  “I’ll have to take my chances.”

  We were quiet for a long moment after that. I could feel the vodka working its way into my guilt. I would be sure to order another when the salads came.

  “So?” Levin finally said. “You called the meeting.”

  I nodded.

  “I want to tell you a story. Not all of the details are set or known. But I’ll tell it to you in the way I think it goes and then you tell me what you think and what I should do. Okay?”

  “I like stories. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t think you’ll like this one. It starts two years ago with — ”

  I stopped and waited while the waitress put down our salads and the cheese bread. I asked for another vodka martini even though I was only halfway through the one I had. I wanted to make sure there was no gap.

  “So,” I said after she was gone. “This whole thing starts two years ago with Jesus Menendez. You remember him, right?”

  “Yeah, we mentioned him the other day. The DNA. He’s the client you always say is in prison because he wiped his prick on a fluffy pink towel.”

  He smiled because it was true that I had often reduced Menendez’s case to such an absurdly vulgar basis. I had often used it to get a laugh when trading war stories at Four Green Fields with other lawyers. That was before I knew what I now knew.