The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  “Can I please go now?” she asked.

  “Maggie, just stay a few minutes.”

  I reached over and turned it down a little.

  “Hey, I’ll turn it off if you’ll sing to me like you used to.”

  “Not tonight, Haller.”

  “Nobody knows the Maggie McFierce I know.”

  She smiled a little and I was quiet for a moment while I remembered those times.

  “Maggie, why do you stay with me?”

  “I told you, I can’t stay.”

  “No, I don’t mean tonight. I’m talking about how you stick with me, how you don’t run me down with Hayley and how you’re there when I need you. Like tonight. I don’t know many people who have ex-wives who still like them.”

  She thought a little bit before answering.

  “I don’t know. I guess because I see a good man and a good father in there waiting to break out one day.”

  I nodded and hoped she was right.

  “Tell me something. What would you do if you couldn’t be a prosecutor?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah, what would you do?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it. Right now I get to do what I’ve always wanted to do. I’m lucky. Why would I want to change?”

  I opened the Tylenol bottle and popped two without a chaser. The next song was “So Many Tears,” another ballad for all of those lost. It seemed appropriate.

  “I think I’d be a teacher,” she finally said. “Grade school. Little girls like Hayley.”

  I smiled.

  “Mrs. McFierce, Mrs. McFierce, my dog ate my homework.”

  She slugged me on the arm.

  “Actually, that’s nice,” I said. “You’d be a good teacher . . . except when you’re sending kids off to detention without bail.”

  “Funny. What about you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I wouldn’t be a good teacher.”

  “I mean what would you do if you weren’t a lawyer.”

  “I don’t know. But I’ve got three Town Cars. I guess I could start a limo service, take people to the airport.”

  Now she smiled at me.

  “I’d hire you.”

  “Good. There’s one customer. Give me a dollar and I’ll tape it to the wall.”

  But the banter wasn’t working. I leaned back, put my palms against my eyes and tried to push away the day, to push out the memory of Raul Levin on the floor of his house, eyes staring at a permanent black sky.

  “You know what I used to be afraid of?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “That I wouldn’t recognize innocence. That it would be there right in front of me and I wouldn’t see it. I’m not talking about guilty or not guilty. I mean innocence. Just innocence.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “But you know what I should have been afraid of?”

  “What, Haller?”

  “Evil. Pure evil.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, most of the people I defend aren’t evil, Mags. They’re guilty, yeah, but they aren’t evil. You know what I mean? There’s a difference. You listen to them and you listen to these songs and you know why they make the choices they make. People are just trying to get by, just to live with what they’re given, and some of them aren’t given a damn thing in the first place. But evil is something else. It’s different. It’s like . . . I don’t know. It’s out there and when it shows up . . . I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

  “You’re drunk, that’s why.”

  “All I know is I should have been afraid of one thing but I was afraid of the complete opposite.”

  She reached over and rubbed my shoulder. The last song was “to live & die in L.A.,” and it was my favorite on the homespun CD. I started to softly hum and then I sang along with the refrain when it came up on the track.

  to live & die in L.A.

  it’s the place to be

  you got to be there to know it

  ev’ybody wanna see

  Pretty soon I stopped singing and pulled my hands down from my face. I fell asleep with my clothes on. I never heard the woman I had loved more than anyone else in my life leave the house. She would tell me later that the last thing I had mumbled before passing out was, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  I wasn’t talking about my singing.

  Wednesday, April 13

  TWENTY-SIX

  I slept almost ten hours but I still woke up in darkness. It said 5:18 on the Bose. I tried to go back to the dream but the door was closed. By 5:30 I rolled out of bed, struggled for equilibrium, and hit the shower. I stayed under the spray until the hot-water tank ran cold. Then I got out and got dressed for another day of fighting the machine.

  It was still too early to call Lorna to check on the day’s schedule but I keep a calendar on my desk that is usually up-to-date. I went into the home office to check it and the first thing I noticed was a dollar bill taped to the wall over the desk.

  My adrenaline jogged up a couple notches as my mind raced and I thought an intruder had left the money on the wall as some sort of threat or message. Then I remembered.

  “Maggie,” I said out loud.

  I smiled and decided to leave the dollar bill taped to the wall.

  I got the calendar out of the briefcase and checked my schedule. It looked like I had the morning free until an 11 A.M. hearing in San Fernando Superior. The case was a repeat client charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. It was a bullshit charge, hardly worth the time and money, but Melissa Menkoff was already on probation for a variety of drug offenses. If she took a fall for something as minor as drug paraphernalia, her probated sentence would kick in and she would end up behind a steel door for six to nine months.

  That was all I had on the calendar. After San Fernando my day was clear and I silently congratulated myself for the foresight I must have used in keeping the day after opening day clear. Of course, I didn’t know when I set up the schedule that the death of Raul Levin would send me into Four Green Fields so early, but it was good planning just the same.

  The hearing on the Menkoff matter involved my motion to suppress the crack pipe found during a search of her vehicle after a reckless driving stop in Northridge. The pipe had been found in the closed center console of her car. She had told me that she had not given permission to the police to search the car but they did anyway. My argument was that there was no consent to search and no probable cause to search. If Menkoff had been pulled over by police for driving erratically, then there was no reason to search the closed compartments of her car.

  It was a loser and I knew it, but Menkoff’s father paid me well to do the best I could for his troubled daughter. And that was exactly what I was going to do at eleven o’clock in San Fernando Court.

  For breakfast I had two Tylenols and chased them with fried eggs, toast and coffee. I doused the eggs liberally with pepper and salsa. It all hit the right spots and gave me the fuel to carry on the battle. I turned the pages of the Times as I ate, looking for a story on the murder of Raul Levin. Inexplicably, there was no story. I didn’t understand this at first. Why would Glendale keep the wraps on this? Then I remembered that the Times put out several regional editions of the paper each morning. I lived on the Westside, and Glendale was considered part of the San Fernando Valley. News of a murder in the Valley may have been deemed by Times editors as unimportant to Westside readers, who had their own region’s murders to worry about. I got no story on Levin.

  I decided I would have to buy a second copy of the Times off a newsstand on the way to San Fernando Court and check again. Thoughts about which newsstand I would direct Earl Briggs to reminded me that I had no car. The Lincoln was in the parking lot at Four Green Fields — unless it had been stolen during the night — and I couldn’t get my keys until the pub opened at eleven for lunch. I had a problem. I had seen Earl’s car in the commuter lot where I picked him up each morning. It was a pim
ped-out Toyota with a low-rider profile and spinning chrome rims. My guess was that it had the permanent stink of weed in it, too. I didn’t want to ride in it. In the north county it was an invitation to a police stop. In the south county it was an invitation to get shot at. I also didn’t want Earl to pick me up at the house. I never let my drivers know where I live.

  The plan I came up with was to take a cab to my warehouse in North Hollywood and use one of the new Town Cars. The Lincoln at Four Green Fields had over fifty thousand miles on it, anyway. Maybe breaking out the new wheels would help me get past the depression sure to set in because of Raul Levin.

  After I had cleaned the frying pan and the dish in the sink I decided it was late enough to risk waking Lorna with a call to confirm my day’s schedule. I went back into the home office and when I picked up the house phone to make the call I heard the broken dial tone that told me I had at least one message waiting.

  I called the retrieval number and was told by an electronic voice that I had missed a call at 11:07 A.M. the day before. When the voice recited the number that the missed call had come from, I froze. The number was Raul Levin’s cell phone. I had missed his last call.

  “Hey, it’s me. You probably left for the game already and I guess you got your cell turned off. If you don’t get this I’ll just catch you there. But I’ve got another ace for you. I guess you — ”

  He broke off for a moment at the background sound of a dog barking.

  “ — could say I’ve got Jesus’s ticket out of the Q. I’ve gotta go, lad.”

  That was it. He hung up without a good-bye and had used that stupid brogue at the end. The brogue had always annoyed me. Now it sounded endearing. I missed it already.

  I pushed the button to replay the message and listened again and then did it three more times before finally saving the message and hanging up. I then sat there in my desk chair and tried to apply the message to what I knew. The first puzzle involved the time of the call. I did not leave for the game until at least 11:30, yet I had somehow missed the call from Levin that had come in more than twenty minutes earlier.

  This made no sense until I remembered the call from Lorna. At 11:07 I had been on the phone with Lorna. My home phone was used so infrequently and so few people had the number that I did not bother to have call waiting installed on the line. This meant that Levin’s last call would have been kicked over to the voicemail system and I would have never known about it as I spoke to Lorna.

  That explained the circumstances of the call but not its contents.

  Levin had obviously found something. He was no lawyer but he certainly knew evidence and how to evaluate it. He had found something that could help me get Menendez out of prison. He had found Jesus’s ticket out.

  The last thing left to consider was the interruption of the dog barking and that was easy. I had been to Levin’s home before and I knew the dog was a high-strung yapper. Every time I had come to the house, I had heard the dog start barking before I had even knocked on the door. The barking in the background on the phone message and Levin hurriedly ending the call told me someone was coming to his door. He had a visitor and it may very well have been his killer.

  I thought about things for a few moments and decided that the timing of the call was something I could not in good conscience keep from the police. The contents of the message would raise new questions that I might have difficulty answering, but that was outweighed by the value of the call’s timing. I went into the bedroom and dug through the pockets of the blue jeans I had worn the day before to the game. In one of the back pockets I found the ticket stub from the game and the business cards Lankford and Sobel had given me at the end of my visit to Levin’s house.

  I chose Sobel’s card and noticed it only said Detective Sobel on it. No first name. I wondered why that was as I made the call. Maybe she was like me, with two different business cards in alternate pockets. One with her complete name in one, one with the more formal name in the other.

  She answered the call right away and I decided to see what I could get from her before I gave her what I had.

  “Anything new on the investigation?” I asked.

  “Not a lot. Not a lot that I can share with you. We are sort of organizing the evidence we have. We got some ballistics back and — ”

  “They already did an autopsy?” I said. “That was quick.”

  “No, the autopsy won’t be until tomorrow.”

  “Then how’d you get ballistics already?”

  She didn’t answer but then I figured it out.

  “You found a casing. He was shot with an automatic that ejected the shell.”

  “You’re good, Mr. Haller. Yes, we found a cartridge.”

  “I’ve done a lot of trials. And call me Mickey. It’s funny, the killer ransacked the place but didn’t pick up the shell.”

  “Maybe that’s because it rolled across the floor and fell into a heating vent. The killer would have needed a screwdriver and a lot of time.”

  I nodded. It was a lucky break. I couldn’t count the number of times clients had gone down because the cops had caught a lucky break. Then again, there were a lot of clients who walked because they caught the break. It all evened out in the end.

  “So, was your partner right about it being a twenty-two?”

  She paused before answering, deciding whether to cross some threshold of revealing case information to me, an involved party in the case but the enemy — a defense lawyer — nonetheless.

  “He was right. And thanks to the markings on the cartridge, we even know the exact gun we are looking for.”

  I knew from questioning ballistics experts and firearms examiners in trials over the years that marks left on bullet casings during the firing process could identify the weapon even without the weapon in hand. With an automatic, the firing pin, breech block, ejector and extractor all leave signature marks on the bullet casing in the split second the weapon is fired. Analyzing the four markings in unison can lead to a specific make and model of the weapon being identified.

  “It turns out that Mr. Levin owned a twenty-two himself,” Sobel said. “But we found it in a closet safe in the house and it’s not a Woodsman. The one thing we have not found is his cell phone. We know he had one but we — ”

  “He was talking to me on it right before he was killed.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “You told us yesterday that the last time you spoke to him was Friday night.”

  “That’s right. But that’s why I am calling. Raul called me yesterday morning at eleven-oh-seven and left me a message. I didn’t get it until today because after I left you people yesterday I just went out and got drunk. Then I went to sleep and didn’t realize I had a message from him till right now. He called about one of the cases he was working on for me sort of on the side. It’s an appellate thing and the client’s in prison. A no-rush thing. Anyway, the content of the message isn’t important but the call helps with the timing. And get this, while he’s leaving the message, you hear the dog start to bark. It did that whenever somebody came to the door. I know because I’d been there before and the dog always barked.”

  Again she hit me with some silence before responding.

  “I don’t understand something, Mr. Haller.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You told us yesterday you were at home until around noon before you left for the game. And now you say that Mr. Levin left a message for you at eleven-oh-seven. Why didn’t you answer the phone?”

  “Because I was on it and I don’t have call waiting. You can check my records, you’ll see I got a call from my office manager, Lorna Taylor. I was talking to her when Raul called. Without call waiting I didn’t know. And of course he thought I had already left for the game so he just left a message.”

  “Okay, I understand. We’ll probably want your permission in writing to look at those records.”

  “No problem.”

  “Where are you now?”

&nbs
p; “I’m at home.”

  I gave her the address and she said that she and her partner were coming.

  “Make it soon. I have to leave for court in about an hour.”

  “We’re coming right now.”

  I closed the phone feeling uneasy. I had defended a dozen murderers over the years and that had brought me into contact with a number of homicide investigators. But I had never been questioned myself about a murder before. Lankford and now Sobel seemed to be suspicious of every answer I could give. It made me wonder what they knew that I didn’t.

  I straightened up things on the desk and closed my briefcase. I didn’t want them seeing anything I didn’t want them to see. I then walked through my house and checked every room. My last stop was the bedroom. I made the bed and put the CD case for Wreckrium for Lil’ Demon back in the night table drawer. And then it hit me. I sat on the bed as I remembered something Sobel had said. She had made a slip and at first it had gone right by me. She had said that they had found Raul Levin’s .22 caliber gun but it was not the murder weapon. She said it was not a Woodsman.

  She had inadvertently revealed to me the make and model of the murder weapon. I knew the Woodsman was an automatic pistol manufactured by Colt. I knew this because I owned a Colt Woodsman Sport Model. It had been bequeathed to me many years ago by my father. Upon his death. Once old enough to handle it, I had never even taken it out of its wooden box.

  I got up from the bed and went to the walk-in closet. I moved as if in a heavy fog. My steps were tentative and I put my hand out to the wall and then the door casement as if needing my bearings. The polished wooden box was on the shelf where it was supposed to be. I reached up with both hands to bring it down and then walked it out to the bedroom.

  I put the box down on the bed and flipped open the brass latch. I raised the lid and pulled away the oilcloth covering.

  The gun was gone.

  PART TWO

  — A WORLD WITHOUT TRUTH

  Monday, May 23

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The check from Roulet cleared. On the first day of trial I had more money in my bank account than I’d ever had in my life. If I wanted, I could drop the bus benches and go with billboards. I could also take the back cover of the yellow pages instead of the half page I had inside. I could afford it. I finally had a franchise case and it had paid off. In terms of money, that is. The loss of Raul Levin would forever make this franchise a losing proposition.