The Lincoln Lawyer Collection

by Connelly, Michael

  Montgomery tried to shake his head but his forehead was pressed between the two bars.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “It means shit. Can’t we win this case, man? I mean, you a prosecutor now. Can’t you get a good word in for me on this?”

  “They’re two different matters, Cash. I can’t do anything like that. You got your choice. Take the three or we go to trial. And like I told you before, we can certainly do some stuff at trial. They’ve got no weapon and a victim who won’t tell the story, but they still got his blood on the door of your car and they got video of you driving it out of Rodia right after the shooting. We can try to play it the way you said it went down. Self-defense. You were there to buy a rock and he saw your roll and tried to rip you off. The jury might believe it, especially if he won’t testify. And they might believe it even if he does testify because I’ll make him take the fifth so many times they’ll think he’s Al Capone before he gets off the stand.”

  “Who’s Al Capone?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, man, who is he?”

  “Never mind, Cash. What do you want to do?”

  “You’re cool if we go to trial?”

  “I’m cool with it. It’s just that there is that gap, you know?”

  “Gap?”

  “There is a wide gap between what they’re offering you right now and what you could get if we lose at trial. We’re talking about a minimum twelve-year swing, Cash. That’s a lot of time to gamble with.”

  Montgomery backed away from the bars. They had left twin impressions on both sides of his forehead. He now gripped the bars in his hands.

  “The thing is, three years, fifteen years, I ain’t going to make it either way. They got hit men in every prison. But in County, they got the system and ev’rybody is separated and locked up tight. I’m okay there.”

  I nodded. But the problem was that any sentence over a year had to be served in a state prison. The county system was a holding system for those awaiting trial or sentenced to short terms.

  “Okay, then I guess we go to trial.”

  “I guess we do.”

  “Sit tight. They’ll be coming back for you soon.”

  I knocked quietly on the courtroom door and the deputy opened it. Court was in session and Judge Champagne was holding a status conference on another case. I saw my prosecutor sitting against the rail and went over to confer. This was the first case I’d had with Philip Hellman and I had found him to be extremely reasonable. I decided to test the limits of that reason one last time.

  “So, Mickey, I hear we are now colleagues,” he said with a smile.

  “Temporarily,” I said. “I don’t plan to make it a career.”

  “Good, I don’t need the competition. So what are we going to do here?”

  “I think we are going to put it over one more time.”

  “Mickey, come on, I’ve been very generous. I can’t keep—”

  “No, you’re right. You’ve been completely generous, Phil, and I appreciate that. My client appreciates that. It’s just that he can’t take a deal because anything that puts him in a state prison is a death penalty. We both know that the Crips will get him.”

  “First of all, I don’t know that. And second of all, if that’s what he thinks, then maybe he shouldn’t have tried to rip off the Crips and shoot one of their guys.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  “That’s a good point but my client maintains it was self-defense. Your vic drew first. So I guess we go to trial and you’ve got to ask a jury for justice for a victim who doesn’t want it. Who will testify only if you force him to and will then claim he doesn’t remember shit.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t. He did get shot, after all.”

  “Yeah, and maybe the jury will buy that, especially when I bring out his pedigree. I’ll ask him what he does for a living for starters. According to what Cisco, my investigator, has found out, he’s been selling drugs since he was twelve years old and his mother put him on the street.”

  “Mickey, we’ve already been down this road. What do you want? I’m getting ready to just say fuck it, let’s go to trial.”

  “What do I want? I want to make sure you don’t fuck up the start of your brilliant career.”

  “What?”

  “Look, man, you are a young prosecutor. Remember what you just said about not wanting the competition? Well, another thing you don’t want is to risk putting a loss on your ledger. Not this early in the game. You just want this to go away. So here’s what I want. A year in County and restitution. You can name your price on restitution.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He said it too loud and drew a look from the judge. He then spoke very quietly.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Not really. It’s a good solution when you think about it, Phil. It works for everybody.”

  “Yeah, and what’s Judge Judy going to say when I present this? The victim is in a wheelchair for life. She won’t sign off on this.”

  “We ask to go back to chambers and we both sell it to her. We tell her that Montgomery wants to go to trial and claim self-defense and that the state has real reservations because of the victim’s lack of cooperation and status as a high-ranking member of a criminal organization. She was a prosecutor before she was a judge. She’ll understand this. And she’ll probably have more sympathy for Montgomery than she does for your drug-dealing victim.”

  Hellman thought for a long moment. The hearing before Champagne ended and she instructed the courtroom deputy to bring Montgomery out. It was the last case of the day.

  “Now or never, Phil,” I prompted.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” he finally said.

  Hellman stood up and moved to the prosecution table.

  “Your Honor,” he intoned, “before we bring the defendant out, could counsel discuss this case in chambers?”

  Champagne, a veteran judge who had seen everything at least three times, creased her brow.

  “On the record, gentlemen?”

  “That’s probably not necessary,” Hellman said. “We would like to discuss the terms of a disposition in the case.”

  “Then by all means. Let’s go.”

  The judge stepped down from the bench and headed back toward her chambers. Hellman and I started to follow. As we got to the gate next to the clerk’s pod, I leaned forward to whisper to the young prosecutor.

  “Montgomery gets credit for time served, right?”

  Hellman stopped in his tracks and turned back to me.

  “You’ve got to be—”

  “Just kidding,” I quickly said.

  I held my hands up in surrender. Hellman frowned and then turned back around and headed toward the judge’s chambers. I had thought it was worth a try.

  Ten

  Thursday, February 18, 7:18 A.M.

  It was a silent breakfast. Madeline Bosch poked at her cereal with her spoon but managed to put very little of it into her stomach. Bosch knew that his daughter wasn’t upset because he was going away for the night. And she wasn’t upset because she wasn’t going. He believed she had come to enjoy the breaks his infrequent travels gave her. The reason she was upset was the arrangements he had made for her care while he was gone. She was fourteen going on twenty-four and her first choice would have been to simply be left alone to fend for herself. Her second choice would have been to stay with her best friend up the street, and her last choice would have been to have Mrs. Bambrough from the school stay at the house with her.

  Bosch knew she was perfectly capable of fending for herself but he wasn’t there yet. They had been living together for only a few months and it had been only those few months since she had lost her mother. He just wasn’t ready to turn her loose, no matter how fervently she insisted she was ready.

  He finally put down his spoon and spoke.

  “Look, Maddie, it’s a school night and last time when you stayed with Rory you
both stayed up all night, slept through most of your classes and had your parents and all your teachers mad at both of you.”

  “I told you we wouldn’t do that again.”

  “I just think we need to wait on that a little bit. I’ll tell Mrs. Bambrough that it’s all right if Rory comes over, just not till midnight. You guys can do your homework together or something.”

  “Like she’s really going to want to come here when I’m being watched by the assistant principal. Thanks for that, Dad.”

  Bosch had to concentrate on not laughing. This issue seemed so simple compared with what she had faced in October after coming to live with him. She still had regular therapy sessions and they seemed to go a long way toward helping her cope with her mother’s death. Bosch would take a dispute over child care over those other deeper issues any day.

  He checked his watch. It was time to go.

  “If you’re done playing with your food you can put your bowl in the sink. We have to get going.”

  “Finished, Dad. You should use the correct word.”

  “Sorry about that. Are you finished playing with your cereal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  He got up from the table and went back to his room to grab his overnight bag off the bed. He was traveling light, expecting the trip to last one night at the most. If they got lucky, they might even catch a late flight home tonight.

  When he came back out, Maddie was standing by the door, her backpack over one shoulder.

  “Ready?”

  “No, I’m just standing here for my health.”

  He walked up to her and kissed the top of her head before she could move away from him. She tried, though.

  “Gotcha.”

  “Daaaad!”

  He locked the door behind them and put his bag in the backseat of the Mustang.

  “You have your key, right?”

  “Yes!”

  “Just making sure.”

  “Can we go? I don’t want to be late.”

  They drove down the hill in silence after that. When they got to the school, he saw Sue Bambrough working the drop-off lane, getting the slow-moving kids out of the cars and into the school, keeping things moving.

  “You know the routine, Mads. Call me, text me, vid me, let me know you’re doing okay.”

  “I’ll get out here.”

  She opened the door early, before they got to where the assistant principal was stationed. Maddie got out and then reached back in to grab her bag. Bosch waited for it, the sign that everything was really okay.

  “Be safe, Dad.”

  There it was.

  “You, too, baby.”

  She closed the door. He lowered the window and drove down to Sue Bambrough. She leaned into the open window.

  “Hey, Sue. She’s a little upset but she’ll get over it by the end of the day. I told her that Aurora Smith could come by but not to make it late. Who knows, maybe they’ll do some homework.”

  “She’ll be fine, Harry.”

  “I left the check on the kitchen counter and there’s some cash there for anything you guys’ll need.”

  “Thanks, Harry. Just let me know if you think it will be more than one night. No problem on my end.”

  Bosch checked the rearview. He wanted to ask a question but didn’t want to hold people up.

  “What is it, Harry?”

  “Uh, to say you’re done doing something, is that wrong? You know, bad English?”

  Sue tried to hide a smile.

  “If she’s correcting you, that’s the natural course of things. Don’t take it personally. We drill it into them here. They go home and want to drill somebody else. It would be proper to say you finished doing something. But I know what you meant.”

  Bosch nodded. Somebody in the line behind him tapped the horn—Bosch assumed it was a man hurrying to make drop-off and then get to work. He waved his thanks to Sue and pulled out.

  Maggie McFierce had called Bosch the night before and told him that there was nothing out of Burbank, so they were taking a direct flight out of LAX. That meant it would be a brutal drive in morning traffic. Bosch lived on a hillside right above the Hollywood Freeway but it was the one freeway that wouldn’t help him get to the airport. Instead, he took Highland down into Hollywood and then cut over to La Cienega. It bottlenecked through the oil fields near Baldwin Hills and he lost his cushion of time. He took La Tijera from there and when he got to the airport he was forced to park in one of the expensive garages close in because he didn’t have time to ride a shuttle bus in from an economy lot.

  After filling out the Law Enforcement Officer forms at the counter and being walked through security by a TSA agent, he finally got to the gate while the plane was in the final stages of loading its passengers. He looked for McPherson but didn’t see her and assumed she was already on the plane.

  He boarded and went through the required meet-and-greet, stepping into the cockpit, showing his badge and shaking the hands of the flight crew. He then made his way toward the back of the plane. He and McPherson had exit-row seats across the aisle from each other. She was already in place, a tall Starbucks cup in hand. She had obviously arrived early for the flight.

  “Thought you weren’t going to make it,” she said.

  “It was close. How’d you get here so early? You have a daughter just like me.”

  “I dropped her with Mickey last night.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Exit row, nice. Who’s your travel agent?”

  “We’ve got a good one. That’s why I wanted to handle it. We’ll send LAPD the bill for you.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that.”

  Bosch had put his bag in an overhead compartment so he would have room to extend his legs. After he sat down and buckled in, he saw that McPherson had shoved two thick files into the seat pocket in front of her. He had nothing out to prep with. His files were in his bag but he didn’t feel like getting them out. He pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and was about to lean across the aisle to ask McPherson a question when a flight attendant came down the aisle and stooped down to whisper to him.

  “You’re the detective, right?”

  “Uh, yes. Is there a—”

  Before he could finish the Dirty Harry line, the flight attendant informed him that they were upgrading him to an unclaimed seat in the first-class section.

  “Oh, that’s nice of you and the captain, but I don’t think I can do that.”

  “There’s no charge. It’s—”

  “No, it’s not that. See, I’m with this lady here and she’s my boss and I—I mean we—need to talk and go over our investigation. She’s a prosecutor, actually.”

  The attendant took a moment to track his explanation and then nodded and said she’d go back to the front of the plane and inform the powers that be.

  “And I thought chivalry was dead,” McPherson said. “You gave up a first-class seat to sit with me.”

  “Actually, I should’ve told her to give it to you. That would have been real chivalry.”

  “Uh-oh, here she comes back.”

  Bosch looked up the aisle. The same smiling attendant was headed back to them.

  “We’re moving some people around and we have room for you both. Come on up.”

  They got up and headed forward, Bosch grabbing his bag out of the overhead and following McPherson. She looked back at him, smiled and said, “My tarnished knight.”

  “Right,” Bosch said.

  The seats were side by side in the first row. McPherson took the window. Soon after they were resituated, the plane took off for its three-hour flight to Seattle.

  “So,” McPherson said, “Mickey told me our daughter has never met your daughter.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Yeah, I guess we need to change that.”

  “Definitely. I hear they’re the same age and you guys compared photos and they even look alike.”

  “Well, her mother sor
t of looked like you. Same coloring.”

  And fire, Bosch thought. He pulled out his phone and turned it on. He showed her a photo of Maddie.

  “That’s remarkable,” McPherson said. “They could be sisters.”

  Bosch looked at his daughter’s photo as he spoke.

  “It’s just been a tough year for her. She lost her mother and moved across an ocean. Left all her friends behind. I’ve been kind of letting her move at her own pace.”

  “All the more reason she should know her family here.”

  Bosch just nodded. In the past year he had fended off numerous calls from his half brother seeking to get their daughters together. He wasn’t sure if his hesitation was about the potential relationship between the two cousins or the two half brothers.

  Sensing that angle of conversation was at an end, McPherson unfolded her table and pulled out her files. Bosch turned his phone off and put it away.

  “So we’re going to work?” he asked.

  “A little. I want to be prepared.”

  “How much do you want to tell her up front? I was thinking we just talk about the ID. Confirm it and see if she’s willing to testify again.”

  “And not bring up the DNA?”

  “Right. That could turn a yes into a no.”

  “But shouldn’t she know everything she’s going to be getting into?”

  “Eventually, yes. It’s been a long time. I did the trace. She hit some hard times and rough spots but it looks like she might’ve come out okay. I guess we’ll see when we get up there.”

  “Let’s play it by ear, then. I think if it feels right, we need to tell her everything.”

  “You make the call.”

  “The one thing that’s good is that she’ll only have to do it once. We don’t have to go through a preliminary hearing or a grand jury. Jessup was held over for trial in ’eighty-six and that is not what the supreme court reversed. So we just go directly to trial. We’ll need her one time and that will be it.”

  “That’s good. And you’ll be handling her.”