“Does Beverly Hills have any ideas?” I finally asked.
“Oh, yeah, they’re pretty sure they know who did it. But they’ll never make a case.”
The hits kept coming. One surprise after another.
“Who?”
“The family.”
“You mean like the Family, with a capital F? Organized crime?” Bosch smiled and shook his head.
“The family of Johan Rilz. They took care of it.”
“How do they know that?”
“Lands and grooves. The bullets they dug out of the two victims were nine-millimeter Parabellums. Brass jacket and casing and manufactured in Germany. BHPD took the bullet profile and matched them to a C-ninety-six Mauser, also manufactured in Germany.”
He paused to see if I had any questions. When I didn’t, he continued.
“Over at BHPD they’re thinking it’s almost like somebody was sending a message.”
“A message from Germany.”
“You got it.”
I thought of Golantz telling the Rilz family how I was going to drag Johan through the mud for a week. They had left rather than witness that. And Elliot was killed before it could happen.
“Parabellum,” I said. “You know your Latin, Detective?”
“Didn’t go to law school. What’s it mean?”
“Prepare for war. It’s part of a saying. ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ What will happen with the investigation now?”
Bosch shrugged.
“I know a couple of Beverly Hills detectives who’ll get a nice trip to Germany out of it. They fly their people business class with the seats that fold down into beds. They’ll go through the motions and the due diligence. But if the hit was done right, nothing will ever happen.”
“How’d they get the gun over here?”
“It could be done. Through Canada or Der FedEx if it absolutely, positively has to be there on time.”
I didn’t smile. I was thinking about Elliot and the equilibrium of justice. Somehow Bosch seemed to know what I was thinking.
“Remember what you said to me when you told me you had told Judge Holder you knew she was behind all of this?”
I shrugged.
“What did I say?”
“You said sometimes justice can’t wait.”
“And?”
“And you were right. Sometimes it doesn’t wait. In that trial, you had the momentum and Elliot looked like he was going to walk. So somebody decided not to wait for justice and he delivered his own verdict. Back when I was riding patrol, you know what we called a killing that came down to simple street justice?”
“What?”
“The brass verdict.”
I nodded. I understood. We were both silent for a long moment.
“Anyway, that’s all I know,” Bosch finally said. “I gotta go and get ready to put people in jail. It’s going to be a good day.”
Bosch pushed his weight off the railing, ready to go.
“It’s funny you coming here today,” I said. “Last night I decided I was going to ask you something the next time I saw you.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
I thought about it for a moment and then nodded. It was the right thing to do.
“Flip sides of the same mountain.... Do you know you look a lot like your father?”
He said nothing. He just stared at me for a moment, then nodded once and turned to the railing. He cast his gaze out at the city.
“When did you put that together?” he asked.
“Technically last night, when I was looking at old photos and scrapbooks with my daughter. But I think on some level I’ve known it for a long time. We were looking at photos of my father. They kept reminding me of somebody and then I realized it was you. Once I saw it, it seemed obvious. I just didn’t see it at first.”
I walked to the railing and looked out at the city with him.
“Most of what I know about him came from books,” I said. “A lot of different cases, a lot of different women. But there are a few memories that aren’t in books and are just mine. I remember coming into the office he had set up at home when he started to get sick. There was a painting framed on the wall—a print actually, but back then I thought it was a real painting. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Weird, scary stuff for a little kid ...
“The memory I have is of him holding me on his lap and making me look at the painting and telling me that it wasn’t scary. That it was beautiful. He tried to teach me to say the painter’s name. Hieronymus Bosch. Rhymes with ‘anonymous,’ he told me. Only back then, I don’t think I could say ‘anonymous’ either.”
I wasn’t seeing the city out there. I was seeing the memory. I was quiet for a while after that. It was my half brother’s turn. Eventually, he leaned his elbows down on the railing and spoke.
“I remember that house,” he said. “I visited him once. Introduced myself. He was on the bed. He was dying.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I just told him I’d made it through. That’s all. There wasn’t really anything else to say.”
Like right now, I thought. What was there to say? Somehow, my thoughts jumped to my own shattered family. I had little contact with the siblings I knew I had, let alone Bosch. And then there was my daughter, whom I saw only eight days a month. It seemed like the most important things in life were the easiest to break apart.
“You’ve known all these years,” I finally said. “Why didn’t you ever make contact? I have another half brother and three half sisters. They’re yours, too, you know.”
Bosch didn’t say anything at first, then he gave an answer I guessed he had been telling himself for a few decades.
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to rock anybody’s boat. Most of the time people don’t like surprises. Not like this.”
For a moment I wondered what my life would’ve been like if I had known about Bosch. Maybe I would’ve been a cop instead of a lawyer. Who knows?
“I’m quitting, you know.”
I wasn’t sure why I had said it.
“Quitting what?”
“My job. The law. You could say the brass verdict was my last verdict.”
“I quit once. It didn’t take. I came back.”
“We’ll see.”
Bosch glanced at me and then put his eyes back out on the city. It was a beautiful day with low-flying clouds and a cold-air front that had compressed the smog layer to a thin amber band on the horizon. The sun had just crested the mountains to the east and was throwing light out on the Pacific. We could see all the way out to Catalina.
“I came to the hospital that time you got shot,” he said. “I wasn’t sure why. I saw it on the news and they said it was a gut shot and I knew those could go either way. I thought maybe if they needed blood or something, I could ... I figured we matched, you know? Anyway, there were all these reporters and cameras. I ended up leaving.”
I smiled and then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
“What’s so funny?”
“You, a cop, volunteering to give blood to a defense attorney. I don’t think they would’ve let you back into the clubhouse if they knew about that.”
Now Bosch smiled and nodded.
“I guess I didn’t think about that.”
And just like that, both our smiles disappeared and the awkwardness of being strangers returned. Eventually Bosch checked his watch.
“The warrant teams are meeting in twenty minutes. I gotta roll.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you around, Counselor.”
“I’ll see you around, Detective.”
He went down the steps and I stayed where I was. I heard his car start up, then pull away and go down the hill.
Fifty-five
I stayed out on the deck after that and looked out at the city as the light moved across it. Many different thoughts filtered through my head and flew off into the sky like the clouds up there, remotely beautifu
l and untouchable. Distant. I was left feeling that I would never see Bosch again. That he would have his side of the mountain and I would have mine and that’s all there would be.
After a while I heard the door open and steps on the deck. I felt my daughter’s presence by my side and I put my hand on her shoulder.
“What are you doing, Dad?”
“Just looking.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“What did that policeman want?”
“Just to talk. He’s a friend of mine.”
We were both silent for a moment before she moved on.
“I wish Mom had stayed with us last night,” she said.
I looked down at her and squeezed the back of her neck.
“One thing at a time, Hay,” I said. “We got her to have pancakes with us last night, didn’t we?”
She thought about it and gave me the nod. She agreed. Pancakes were a start.
“I’m going to be late if we don’t go,” she said. “One more time and I’ll get a conduct slip.”
I nodded.
“Too bad. The sun’s just about to hit the ocean.”
“Come on, Dad. That happens every day.”
I nodded.
“Somewhere, at least.”
I went in for the keys, then locked up and we went down the steps to the garage. By the time I backed the Lincoln out and had it pointed down the hill, I could see the sun was spinning gold on the Pacific.
Cop Speak
TO: Training Officer
SLO: Senior Lead Officer
GOA: Gone On Arrival
P-1: Patrol Officer first grade
PAB: Police Administration Building
boot: rookie officer
slick sleeve: officer with fewer than five years in the department
6: police radio designation for Hollywood Division
dragon: male dressed in women’s clothing
hot shot: high-priority emergency call
UC: Undercover Officer
CP: Command Post
Code 7: out of service
The Rock: Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD)
CAPs: Crimes Against Persons unit
FSD: Forensic Sciences Division
DR number: Divisional Reporting number
HVC: High Value Constituent
PTD: Pre-Trial Diversion
To Shannon Byrne
with many thanks
Contents
Dedication
Title Page
PART ONE: The Perp Walk
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
PART TWO: The Labyrinth
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
PART THREE: To Seek a True and Just Verdict
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
PART FOUR: The Silent Witness
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
PART FIVE: The Takedown
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
PART SIX: All That Remains
Forty-five
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
—The Perp Walk
One
Tuesday, February 9, 1:43 P.M.
The last time I’d eaten at the Water Grill I sat across the table from a client who had coldly and calculatedly murdered his wife and her lover, shooting both of them in the face. He had engaged my services to not only defend him at trial but fully exonerate him and restore his good name in the public eye. This time I was sitting with someone with whom I needed to be even more careful. I was dining with Gabriel Williams, the district attorney of Los Angeles County.
It was a crisp afternoon in midwinter. I sat with Williams and his trusted chief of staff—read political advisor—Joe Ridell. The meal had been set for 1:30 P.M., when most courthouse lawyers would be safely back in the CCB, and the DA would not be advertising his dalliance with a member of the dark side. Meaning me, Mickey Haller, defender of the damned.
The Water Grill was a nice place for a downtown lunch. Good food and atmosphere, good separation between tables for private conversation, and a wine list hard to top in all of downtown. It was the kind of place where you kept your suit jacket on and the waiter put a black napkin across your lap so you needn’t be bothered with doing it yourself. The prosecution team ordered martinis at the county taxpayers’ expense and I stuck with the free water the restaurant was pouring. It took Williams two gulps of gin and one olive before he got to the reason we were hiding in plain sight.
“Mickey, I have a proposition for you.”
I nodded. Ridell had already said as much when he had called that morning to set up the lunch. I had agreed to the meet and then had gone to work on the phone myself, trying to gather any inside information I could on what the proposition would be. Not even my first ex-wife, who worked in the district attorney’s employ, knew what was up.
“I’m all ears,” I said. “It’s not every day that the DA himself wants to give you a proposition. I know it can’t be in regard to any of my clients—they wouldn’t merit much attention from the guy at the top. And at the moment I’m only carrying a few cases anyway. Times are slow.”
“Well, you’re right,” Williams said. “This is not about any of your clients. I have a case I would like you to take on.”
I nodded again. I understood now. They all hate the defense attorney until they need the defense attorney. I didn’t know if Williams had any children but he would have known through due diligence that I didn’t do juvy work. So I was guessing it had to be his wife. Probably a shoplifting grab or a DUI he was trying to keep under wraps.
“Who got popped?” I asked.
Williams looked at Ridell and they shared a smile.
“No, nothing like that,” Williams said. “My proposition is this. I would like to hire you, Mickey. I want you to come work at the DA’s office.”
Of all the ideas that had been rattling around in my head since I had taken Ridell’s call, being hired as a prosecutor wasn’t one of them. I’d been a card-carrying member of the criminal defense bar for more than twenty years. During that time I’d grown a suspicion and distrust of prosecutors and police that might not have equaled that of the gangbangers down in Nickerson Gardens but was at least at a level that would seem to exclude me from ever joining their ranks. Plain and simple, they wouldn’t want me and I wouldn’t want them. Except for that ex-wife I mentioned and a half brother who was an LAPD detective, I wouldn’t turn my back on any of them. Especially Williams. He was a politician first and a prosecutor second. That made him even more dangerous. Though briefly a prosecutor early in his legal career, he spent two decades as a civil rights attorney before running for the DA post as an outsider and riding into office on a tide of anti-police and -prosecutor sentiment. I was employing full caution at the fancy lunch from the moment the napkin went across my lap.
“Work for you?” I asked. “Doing what exactly?”
“As a special prosecutor. A onetime deal. I want you to handle the Jason Jessup case.”
I looked at him for a long moment. First I thought I would laugh out loud. This was som
e sort of cleverly orchestrated joke. But then I understood that couldn’t be the case. They don’t take you out to the Water Grill just to make a joke.
“You want me to prosecute Jessup? From what I hear there’s nothing to prosecute. That case is a duck without wings. The only thing left to do is shoot it and eat it.”
Williams shook his head in a manner that seemed intended to convince himself of something, not me.
“Next Tuesday is the anniversary of the murder,” he said. “I’m going to announce that we intend to retry Jessup. And I would like you standing next to me at the press conference.”
I leaned back in my seat and looked at them. I’ve spent a good part of my adult life looking across courtrooms and trying to read juries, judges, witnesses and prosecutors. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But at that table I couldn’t read Williams or his sidekick sitting three feet away from me.
Jason Jessup was a convicted child killer who had spent nearly twenty-four years in prison until a month earlier, when the California Supreme Court reversed his conviction and sent the case back to Los Angeles County for either retrial or a dismissal of the charges. The reversal came after a two-decade-long legal battle staged primarily from Jessup’s cell and with his own pen. Authoring appeals, motions, complaints and whatever legal challenges he could research, the self-styled lawyer made no headway with state and federal courts but did finally win the attention of an organization of lawyers known as the Genetic Justice Project. They took over his cause and his case and eventually won an order for genetic testing of semen found on the dress of the child Jessup had been convicted of strangling.
Jessup had been convicted before DNA analysis was used in criminal trials. The analysis performed these many years later determined that the semen found on the dress had not come from Jessup but from another unknown individual. Though the courts had repeatedly upheld Jessup’s conviction, this new information tipped the scales in Jessup’s favor. The state’s supreme court cited the DNA findings and other inconsistencies in the evidence and trial record and reversed the case.
This was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of the Jessup case, and it was largely information gathered from newspaper stories and courthouse scuttlebutt. While I had not read the court’s complete order, I had read parts of it in the Los Angeles Times and knew it was a blistering decision that echoed many of Jessup’s long-held claims of innocence as well as police and prosecutorial misconduct in the case. As a defense attorney, I can’t say I wasn’t pleased to see the DA’s office raked over the media coals with the ruling. Call it underdog schadenfreude. It didn’t really matter that it wasn’t my case or that the current regime in the DA’s office had nothing to do with the case back in 1986, there are so few victories from the defense side of the bar that there is always a sense of communal joy in the success of others and the defeat of the establishment.
The Lincoln Lawyer Collection Page 77
