“Who’s yelling now? Look, I don’t care what you’re telling me. I can’t deal with a client who doesn’t level, who doesn’t see the percentage in telling his own attorney what is going on. So the DA has made an offer to you and I think you better take it.”
Roulet sat up straight and grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the table. He took one out and lit it off the one he already had going.
“I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do,” he said, his voice suddenly calm after a deep drag off the fresh smoke.
“Seven years. You’ll be out in four. You have till court time Monday and then it disappears. Think about it, then tell me you want to take it.”
“I won’t take it. I didn’t do this thing and if you won’t take it to trial, then I will find somebody who will.”
Levin was holding the discovery file. I reached down and rudely grabbed it out of his hands so I could read directly from the weapon report.
“You didn’t do it?” I said to Roulet. “Okay, if you didn’t do it, then would you mind telling me why you went to see this prostitute with a custom-made Black Ninja knife with a five-inch blade, complete with your initials engraved not once, but twice on both sides of the blade?”
Finished reading from the report, I threw it back to Levin. It went through his hands and slapped against his chest.
“Because I always carry it!”
The force of Roulet’s response quieted the room. I paced back and forth once, staring at him.
“You always carry it,” I said, not a question.
“That’s right. I’m a realtor. I drive expensive cars. I wear expensive jewelry. And I often meet strangers alone in empty houses.”
Again he gave me pause. As hyped up as I was, I still knew a glimmer when I saw one. Levin leaned forward and looked at Roulet and then at me. He saw it, too.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You sell homes to rich people.”
“How do you know they are rich when they call you up and say they want to see a place?”
I stretched my hands out in confusion.
“You must have some sort of system for checking them out, right?”
“Sure, we can run a credit report and we can ask for references. But it still comes down to what they give us and these kind of people don’t like to wait. When they want to see a piece of property, they want to see it. There are a lot of realtors out there. If we don’t act quickly, there will be somebody else who will.”
I nodded. The glimmer was getting brighter. There might be something here I could work with.
“There have been murders, you know,” Roulet said. “Over the years. Every realtor knows the danger exists when you go to some of these places alone. For a while there was somebody out there called the Real Estate Rapist. He attacked and robbed women in empty houses. My mother . . .”
He didn’t finish. I waited. Nothing.
“What about your mother?”
Roulet hesitated before answering.
“She was showing a place in Bel-Air once. She was alone and she thought it was safe because it was Bel-Air. The man raped her. He left her tied up. When she didn’t come back to the office, I went to the house. I found her.”
Roulet’s eyes were staring at the memory.
“How long ago was this?” I asked.
“About four years. She stopped selling after it happened. Just stayed in her office and never showed another property again. I did the selling. And that’s when and why I got the knife. I’ve had it for four years and carry it everywhere but on planes. It was in my pocket when I went to that apartment. I didn’t think anything about it.”
I dropped into the chair across the table from the couch. My mind was working. I was seeing how it could work. It was still a defense that relied on coincidence. Roulet was set up by Campo and the setup was aided coincidentally when she found the knife on him after knocking him out. It could work.
“Did your mother file a police report?” Levin asked. “Was there an investigation?”
Roulet shook his head as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
“No, she was too embarrassed. She was afraid it would get into the paper.”
“Who else knows about it?” I asked.
“Uh, me . . . and Cecil I’m sure knows. Probably nobody else. You can’t use this. She would —”
“I won’t use it without her permission,” I said. “But it could be important. I’ll have to talk to her about it.”
“No, I don’t want you —”
“Your life and livelihood are on the line here, Louis. You get sent to prison and you’re not going to make it. Don’t worry about your mother. A mother will do what she has to do to protect her young.”
Roulet looked down and shook his head.
“I don’t know . . . ,” he said.
I exhaled, trying to lose all my tension with the breath. Disaster may have been averted.
“I know one thing,” I said. “I’m going to go back to the DA and say pass on the deal. We’ll go to trial and take our chances.”
SIXTEEN
T he hits kept coming. The other shoe didn’t drop on the prosecution’s case until after I’d dropped Earl off at the commuter lot where he parked his own car every morning and I drove the Lincoln back to Van Nuys and Four Green Fields. It was a shotgun pub on Victory Boulevard—maybe that was why lawyers liked the place—with the bar running down the left side and a row of scarred wooden booths down the right. It was crowded as only an Irish bar can be the night of St. Patrick’s Day. My guess was that the crowd was swollen even bigger than in previous years because of the fact that the drinker’s holiday fell on a Thursday and many revelers were kicking off a long weekend. I had made sure my own calendar was clear on Friday. I always clear the day after St. Pat’s.
As I started to fight my way through the mass in search of Maggie McPherson, the required “Danny Boy” started blaring from a jukebox somewhere in the back. But it was a punk rock version from the early eighties and its driving beat obliterated any chance I had of hearing anything when I saw familiar faces and said hello or asked if they had seen my ex-wife. The small snippets of conversation I overheard as I pushed through seemed to all be about Robert Blake and the stunning verdict handed down the day before.
I ran into Robert Gillen in the crowd. The cameraman reached into his pocket and pulled out four crisp hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. The bills were probably four of the original ten I had paid him two weeks earlier in the Van Nuys courthouse as I tried to impress Cecil Dobbs with my media manipulation skills. I had already expensed the thousand to Roulet. The four hundred was profit.
“I thought I’d run into you here,” he yelled in my ear.
“Thanks, Sticks,” I replied. “It’ll go toward my bar tab.”
He laughed. I looked past him into the crowd for my ex-wife.
“Anytime, my man,” he said.
He slapped me on the shoulder as I squeezed by him and pushed on. I finally found Maggie in the last booth in the back. It was full of six women, all prosecutors or secretaries from the Van Nuys office. Most I knew at least in passing but the scene was awkward because I had to stand and yell over the music and the crowd. Plus the fact that they were prosecutors and viewed me as being in league with the devil. They had two pitchers of Guinness on the table and one was full. But my chances of getting through the crowd to the bar to get a glass were negligible. Maggie noticed my plight and offered to share her glass with me.
“It’s all right,” she yelled. “We’ve swapped spit before.”
I smiled and knew the two pitchers on the table had not been the first two. I took a long drink and it tasted good. Guinness always gave me a solid center.
Maggie was in the middle on the left side of the booth and between two young prosecutors whom I knew she had taken under her wing. In the Van Nuys office, many of the younger females gravitated toward my ex-wife because the man in charge, Smithson, surrounded him
self with attorneys like Minton.
Still standing at the side of the booth, I raised the glass in toast to her but she couldn’t respond because I had her glass. She reached over and raised the pitcher.
“Cheers!”
She didn’t go so far as to drink from the pitcher. She put it down and whispered to the woman on the outside of the booth. She got up to let Maggie out. My ex-wife stood up and kissed me on the cheek and said, “It’s always easier for a lady to get a glass in these sorts of situations.”
“Especially beautiful ladies,” I said.
She gave me one of her looks and turned toward the crowd that was five deep between us and the bar. She whistled shrilly and it caught the attention of one of the pure-bred Irish guys who worked the tap handles and could etch a harp or an angel or a naked lady in the foam at the top of the glass.
“I need a pint glass,” she yelled.
The bartender had to read her lips. And like a teenager being passed over the heads of the crowd at a Pearl Jam concert, a clean glass made its way back to us hand to hand. She filled it from the freshest pitcher on the booth’s table and then we clicked glasses.
“So,” she said. “Are you feeling a little better than when I saw you today?”
I nodded.
“A little.”
“Did Minton sandbag you?”
I nodded again.
“Him and the cops did, yeah.”
“With that guy Corliss? I told them he was full of shit. They all are.”
I didn’t respond and tried to act like what she had just said was not news to me and that Corliss was a name I already knew. I took a long and slow drink from my glass.
“I guess I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “But my opinion doesn’t matter. If Minton is dumb enough to use him, then you’ll take the guy’s head off, I’m sure.”
I guessed that she was talking about a witness. But I had seen nothing in my review of the discovery file that mentioned a witness named Corliss. The fact that it was a witness she didn’t trust led me further to believe that Corliss was a snitch. Most likely a jailhouse snitch.
“How come you know about him?” I finally asked. “Minton talked to you about him?”
“No, I’m the one who sent him to Minton. Doesn’t matter what I think of what he said, it was my duty to send him to the right prosecutor and it was up to Minton to evaluate him.”
“I mean, why did he come to you?”
She frowned at me because the answer was so obvious.
“Because I handled the first appearance. He was there in the pen. He thought the case was still mine.”
Now I understood. Corliss was a C. Roulet was taken out of alphabetical order and called first. Corliss must have been in the group of inmates taken into the courtroom with him. He had seen Maggie and me argue over Roulet’s bail. He therefore thought Maggie still had the case. He must have made a snitch call to her.
“When did he call you?” I asked.
“I am telling you too much, Haller. I’m not —”
“Just tell me when he called you. That hearing was on a Monday, so was it later that day?”
The case did not make any notice in the newspapers or on TV. So I was curious as to where Corliss would have gotten the information he was trying to trade to prosecutors. I had to assume it didn’t come from Roulet. I was pretty sure I had scared him silent. Without a media information point, Corliss would have been left with the information gleaned in court when the charges were read and Maggie and I argued bail.
It was enough, I realized. Maggie had been specific in detailing Regina Campo’s injuries as she was trying to impress the judge to hold Roulet without bail. If Corliss had been in court, he’d have been privy to all the details he would need to make up a jailhouse confession from my client. Add that to his proximity to Roulet and a jailhouse snitch is born.
“Yes, he called me late Monday,” Maggie finally answered.
“So why did you think he was full of shit? He’s done it before, hasn’t he? The guy’s a professional snitch, right?”
I was fishing and she knew it. She shook her head.
“I am sure you will find out all you need to know during discovery. Can we just have a friendly pint of Guinness here? I have to leave in about an hour.”
I nodded but wanted to know more.
“Tell you what,” I said. “You’ve probably had enough Guinness for one St. Patrick’s Day. How about we get out of here and get something to eat?”
“Why, so you can keep asking me about your case?”
“No, so we can talk about our daughter.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Not that I know of. But I want to talk to you about her.”
“Where are you taking me to dinner?”
I mentioned an expensive Italian restaurant on Ventura in Sherman Oaks and her eyes got warm. It had been a place we had gone to celebrate anniversaries and getting pregnant. Our apartment, which she still had, was a few blocks away on Dickens.
“Think we can eat there in an hour?” she asked.
“If we leave right now and order without looking.”
“You’re on. Let me just say some quick good-byes.”
“I’ll drive.”
And it was a good thing I drove because she was unsteady on her feet. We had to walk hip to hip to the Lincoln and then I helped her get in.
I took Van Nuys south to Ventura. After a few moments Maggie reached beneath her legs and pulled out a CD case she had been uncomfortably sitting on. It was Earl’s. One of the CDs he listened to on the car stereo when I was in court. It saved juice on his iPod. The CD was by a dirty south performer named Ludacris.
“No wonder I was so uncomfortable,” she said. “Is this what you’re listening to while driving between courthouses?”
“Actually, no. That’s Earl’s. He’s been doing the driving lately. Ludacris isn’t really to my liking. I’m more of an old school guy. Tupac and Dre and people like that.”
She laughed because she thought I was kidding. A few minutes later we drove down the narrow alley that led to the door of the restaurant. A valet took the car and we went in. The hostess recognized us and acted like it had only been a couple weeks since the last time we had been in. The truth was, we had probably both been in there recently, but each with other partners.
I asked for a bottle of Singe Shiraz and we ordered pasta dishes without looking at a menu. We skipped salads and appetizers and told the waiter not to delay bringing the food out. After he left I checked my watch and saw we still had forty-five minutes. Plenty of time.
The Guinness was catching up with Maggie. She smiled in a fractured sort of way that told me she was drunk. Beautifully drunk. She never got mean under a buzz. She always got sweeter. It was probably how we’d ended up having a child together.
“You should probably lay off the wine,” I told her. “Or you’ll have a headache tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll lay what I want and lay off what I want.”
She smiled at me and I smiled back.
“So how you been, Haller? I mean really.”
“Fine. You? And I mean really.”
“Never better. Are you past Lorna now?”
“Yeah, we’re even friends.”
“And what are we?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes adversaries, I guess.”
She shook her head.
“We can’t be adversaries if we can’t stay on the same case together. Besides, I’m always looking out for you. Like with that dirtbag, Corliss.”
“Thanks for trying, but he still did the damage.”
“I just have no respect for a prosecutor who would use a jailhouse snitch. Doesn’t matter that your client is an even bigger dirtbag.”
“He wouldn’t tell me exactly what Corliss said my guy said.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He just said he had a snitc
h. He wouldn’t reveal what he said.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s what I said. It’s a discovery issue but we don’t get a judge assigned until after the arraignment Monday. So there’s nobody I can really complain to yet. Minton knows that. It’s like you warned me. He doesn’t play fair.”
Her cheeks flushed. I had pushed the right buttons and she was angry. For Maggie, winning fair was the only way to win. That was why she was a good prosecutor.
We were sitting at the end of the banquette that ran along the back wall of the restaurant. We were on both sides of a corner. Maggie leaned toward me but went too far and we banged heads. She laughed but then tried again. She spoke in a low voice.
“He said that he asked your guy what he was in for and your guy said, ‘For giving a bitch exactly what she deserved.’ He said your client told him he punched her out as soon as she opened her door.”
She leaned back and I could tell she had moved too quickly, bringing on a swoon of vertigo.
“You okay?”
“Yes, but can we change the subject? I don’t want to talk about work anymore. There are too many assholes and it’s too frustrating.”
“Sure.”
Just then the waiter brought our wine and our dinners at the same time. The wine was good and the food was like home comfort. We started out eating quietly. Then Maggie hit me with a pitch right out of the blue.
“You didn’t know anything about Corliss, did you? Not till I opened my big mouth.”
“I knew Minton was hiding something. I thought it was a jailhouse —”
“Bullshit. You got me drunk so you could find out what I knew.”
“Uh, I think you were already drunk when I hooked up with you tonight.”
She was poised with her fork up over her plate, a long string of linguine with pesto sauce hanging off it. She then pointed the fork at me.
“Good point. So what about our daughter?”
I wasn’t expecting her to remember that. I shrugged.
“I think what you said last week is right. She needs her father more in her life.”
“And?”
“And I want to play a bigger part. I like watching her. Like when I took her to that movie on Saturday. I was sort of sitting sideways so I could watch her watching the movie. Watch her eyes, you know?”