“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 been 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
A s 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 st
ealing 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.
I did not return the smile.
“Yeah, well, it turns out Jesus didn’t do it.”
“What do you mean? Somebody else wiped his prick on the towel?”
This time Levin laughed out loud.
“No, you don’t get it. I’m telling you Jesus Menendez was innocent.”
Levin’s face grew serious. He nodded, putting something together.
“He’s in San Quentin. You were up at the Q today.”
I nodded.
“Let me back up and tell the story,” I said. “You didn’t do much work for me on Menendez because there was nothing to be done. They had the DNA, his own incriminating statement and three witnesses who saw him throw a knife into the river. They never found the knife but they had the witnesses—his own roommates. It was a hopeless case. Truth is, I took it on the come line for publicity value. So basically all I did was walk him to a plea. He didn’t like it, said he didn’t do it, but there was no choice. The DA was going for the death penalty. He’d have gotten that or life without. I got him life with and I made the little fucker take it. I made him.”
I looked down at my untouched salad. I realized I didn’t feel like eating. I just felt like drinking and pickling the cork in my brain that contained all the guilt cells.
Levin waited me out. He wasn’t eating, either.
“In case you don’t remember, the case was about the murder of a woman named Martha Renteria. She was a dancer at The Cobra Room on East Sunset. You didn’t end up going there on this, did you?”
Levin shook his head.
“They don’t have a stage,” I said. “They have like a pit in the center and for each number, these guys dressed like Aladdin come out carrying this big cobra basket between two bamboo poles. They put it down and the music starts. Then the top comes off the basket and the girl comes up dancing. Then her top comes off, too. Kind of a new take on the dancer coming out of the cake.”
“It’s Hollywood, baby,” Levin said. “You gotta have a show.”
“Well, Jesus Menendez liked the show. He had eleven hundred dollars his brother the drug dealer gave him and he took a fancy to Martha Renteria. Maybe because she was the only dancer who was shorter than him. Maybe because she spoke Spanish to him. After her set they sat and talked and then she circulated a little bit and came back and pretty soon he knew he was in competition with another guy in the club. He trumped the other guy by offering her five hundred if she’d take him home.”
“But he didn’t kill her when he got there?”
“Uh-uh. He followed her car in his. Got there, had sex, flushed the condom, wiped his prick on the towel and then he went home. The story starts after he left.”
“The real killer.”
“The real killer knocks on the door, maybe fakes like it’s Jesus and that he’s forgotten something. She opens the door. Or maybe it was an appointment. She was expecting the knock and she opens the door.”
“The guy from the club? The one Menendez was bidding against?”
I nodded.
“Exactly. He comes in, punches her a few times to soften her up and then takes out his folding knife and holds it against her neck while he walks her to the bedroom. Sound familiar? Only she isn’t lucky like Reggie Campo would be in a couple years. He puts her on the bed, puts on a condom and climbs on top. Now the knife is on the other side of her neck and he keeps it there while he rapes her. And when he’s done, he kills her. He stabs her with that knife again and again. It’s a case of overkill if there ever was one. He’s working out something in his sick fucking mind while he’s doing it.”
My second martini came and I took it right from the waitress’s hand and gulped half of it down. She asked if we were finished with our salads and we both waved them away untouched.
“Your steaks will be right out,” she said. “Or do you want me to just dump them in the garbage and save you the time?”
I looked up at her. She was smiling but I was so caught up in the story I was telling that I had missed what it was she had said.
“Never mind,” she said. “They’ll be right out.”
I got right back to the story. Levin said nothing.
“After she’s dead the killer cleans up. He takes his time, because what’s the hurry, she’s not going anywhere or calling anybody. He wipes the place down to take care of any fingerprints he might have left. And in the process he wipes away Menendez’s prints. This will look bad for Menendez when he later goes to the police to explain that he is the guy in the sketches but he didn’t kill Martha. They’ll look at him and say, ‘Then why’d you wear gloves when you were there?’”