“What?”
“It’s just routine. The scene indicates the victim knew his killer. He let the shooter right into the back room. As I said before, he was probably sitting in his desk chair when he took the bullet. Looks to me like he was quite comfortable with his killer. We are going to have to clear all acquaintances, professional and social.”
“Are you saying I’m a suspect in this?”
“No, I’m just trying to clear things up and tighten the focus.”
“I was home all morning. I was getting ready to meet Raul at Dodger Stadium. I left for the stadium about twelve and that’s where I was when you called.”
“What about before that?”
“Like I said, I was home. I was alone. But I got a phone call about eleven that will put me in my house and I’m at least a half hour from here. If he was killed after eleven, then I’m clear.”
Lankford didn’t rise to the bait. He didn’t give me the time of death. Maybe it was unknown at the moment.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” he asked instead.
“Last night by telephone.”
“Who called who and why?”
“He called me and asked if I could get to the game early. I said I could.”
“How come?”
“He likes to—he liked to watch batting practice. He said we could jaw over the Roulet case a little bit. Nothing specific but he hadn’t updated me in about a week.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” Lankford said, sarcasm heavy in his voice.
“You realize that I just did what I tell every client and anybody who will listen not to do? I talked to you without a lawyer present, gave you my alibi. I must be out of my mind.”
“I said thank you.”
Sobel spoke up.
“Is there anything else you can tell us, Mr. Haller? About Mr. Levin or his work.”
“Yeah, there is one other thing. Something you should probably check out. But I want to remain confidential on it.”
I looked past them at the uniformed officer still standing in the hallway. Sobel followed my eyes and understood I wanted privacy.
“Officer, you can wait out front, please,” she said.
The officer left, looking annoyed, probably because he had been dismissed by a woman.
“Okay,” Lankford said. “What have you got?”
“I’ll have to look up the exact dates but a few weeks ago, back in March, Raul did some work for me on another case that involved one of my clients snitching off a drug dealer. He made some calls, helped ID the guy. I heard afterward that the guy was a Colombian and he was pretty well connected. He could have had friends who . . .”
I left it for them to fill in the blanks.
“I don’t know,” Lankford said. “This was pretty clean. Doesn’t look like a revenge deal. They didn’t cut his throat or take his tongue. One shot, plus they ransacked the office. What would the dealer’s people be looking for?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe my client’s name. The deal I made kept it out of circulation.”
Lankford nodded thoughtfully.
“What is the client’s name?”
“I can’t tell you. Attorney-client privilege.”
“Okay, here we go with that bullshit. How are we going to investigate this if we don’t even know your client’s name? Don’t you care about your friend in there on the floor with a piece of lead in his heart?”
“Yes, I care. I’m obviously the only one here who does care. But I am also bound by the rules and ethics of law.”
“Your client could be in danger.”
“My client is safe. My client is in lockdown.”
“It’s a woman, isn’t it?” Sobel said. “You keep saying ‘client’ instead of he or she.”
“I’m not talking to you about my client. If you want the name of the dealer, it’s Hector Arrande Moya. He’s in federal custody. I believe the originating charge came out of a DEA case in San Diego. That’s all I can tell you.”
Sobel wrote it all down. I believed I had now given them sufficient reason to look beyond Roulet and the gay angle.
“Mr. Haller, have you ever been in Mr. Levin’s office before?” Sobel asked.
“A few times. Not in a couple months, at least.”
“Do you mind walking back with us anyway? Maybe you’ll see something out of place or notice something that’s missing.”
“Is he still back there?”
“The victim? Yes, he’s still as he was found.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Raul Levin’s body in the center of a murder scene. I then decided all at once that I must see him and I must not forget the vision. I would need it to fuel my resolve and my plan.
“Okay, I’ll go back.”
“Then put these on and don’t touch anything while you’re back there,” Lankford said. “We’re still processing the scene.”
From his pocket he produced a folded pair of paper booties. I sat down on Raul’s couch and put them on. Then I followed them down the hallway to the death room.
Raul Levin’s body was in situ—as they had found it. He was chest-down on the floor, his face turned to his right, his mouth and eyes open. His body was in an awkward posture, one hip higher than the other and his arms and hands beneath him. It seemed clear that he had fallen from the desk chair that was behind him.
I immediately regretted my decision to come into the room. I suddenly knew that the final look on Raul’s face would crowd out all other visual memories I had of him. I would be forced to try to forget him, so I would not have to look at those eyes in my mind again.
It was the same with my father. My only visual memory was of a man in a bed. He was a hundred pounds tops and was being ravaged from the inside out by cancer. All the other visuals I carried of him were false. They came from pictures in books I had read.
There were a number of people working in the room. Crime scene investigators and people from the medical examiner’s office. My face must have shown the horror I was feeling.
“You know why we can’t cover him up?” Lankford asked me. “Because of people like you. Because of O.J. It’s what they call evidence transference. Something you lawyers like to jump all over on. So no sheets over the body anymore. Not till we move it out of here.”
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded. He was right.
“Can you step over here to the desk and tell us if you see anything unusual?” Sobel asked, apparently having some sympathy for me.
I was thankful to do it because I could keep my back to the body. I walked over to the desk, which was a conjoining of three worktables forming a turn in the corner of the room. It was furniture I recognized had come from the IKEA store in nearby Burbank. It was nothing fancy. It was simple and useful. The center table in the corner had a computer on top and a pull-out tray for a keyboard. The tables to either side looked like twin work spaces and possibly were used by Levin to keep separate investigations from mingling.
My eyes lingered on the computer as I wondered what Levin may have put on electronic files about Roulet. Sobel noticed.
“We don’t have a computer expert,” she said. “Too small a department. We’ve got a guy coming from the sheriff’s office but it looks to me like the whole drive was pulled out.”
She pointed with her pen under the table to where the PC unit was sitting upright but with one side of its plastic cowling having been removed and placed to the rear.
“Probably won’t be anything there for us,” she said. “What about the desks?”
My eyes moved over the table to the left of the computer first. Papers and files were spread across it in a haphazard way. I looked at some of the tabs and recognized the names.
“Some of these are my clients but they’re old cases. Not active.”
“They probably came from the file cabinets in the closet,” Sobel said. “The killer could have dumped them here to confuse us. To hide what he was really look
ing for or taking. What about over here?”
We stepped over to the table to the right of the computer. This one was not in as much disarray. There was a calendar blotter on which it was clear Levin kept a running account of his hours and which attorney he was working for at the time. I scanned the blocks and saw my name numerous times going back five weeks. It was as they had told me, he had practically been working full-time for me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to look for. I don’t see anything that could help.”
“Well, most attorneys aren’t that helpful,” Lankford said from behind me.
I didn’t bother to turn around to defend myself. He was by the body and I didn’t want to see what he was doing. I reached out to turn the Rolodex that was on the table just so I could look through the names on the cards.
“Don’t touch that!” Sobel said instantly.
I jerked my hand back.
“Sorry. I was just going to look through the names. I don’t . . .”
I didn’t finish. I was at sea here. I wanted to leave and get something to drink. I felt like the Dodger dog that had tasted so good back at the stadium was about to come up.
“Hey, check it out,” Lankford said.
I turned with Sobel and saw that the medical examiner’s people were slowly turning Levin’s body over. Blood had stained the front of the Dodgers shirt he was wearing. But Lankford was pointing to the dead man’s hands, which had not been visible beneath the body before. The two middle fingers of his left hand were folded down against the palm while the two outside fingers were fully extended.
“Was this guy a Texas Longhorns fan or what?” Lankford asked.
Nobody laughed.
“What do you think?” Sobel said to me.
I stared down at my friend’s last gesture and just shook my head.
“Oh, I got it,” Lankford said. “It’s like a signal. A code. He’s telling us that the devil did it.”
I thought of Raul calling Roulet the devil, of having the proof that he was evil. And I knew what my friend’s last message to me meant. As he died on the floor of his office, he tried to tell me. Tried to warn me.
TWENTY-FOUR
I went to Four Green Fields and ordered a Guinness but quickly escalated to vodka over ice. I didn’t think there was any sense in delaying things. The Dodgers game was finishing up on the TV over the bar. The boys in blue were rallying, down now by just two with the bases loaded in the ninth. The bartender had his eyes glued to the screen but I didn’t care anymore about the start of new seasons. I didn’t care about ninth-inning rallies.
After the second vodka assault, I brought the cell phone up onto the bar and started making calls. First I called the four other lawyers from the game. We had all left when I had gotten the word but they went home only knowing that Levin was dead, none of the details. Then I called Lorna and she cried on the phone. I talked her through it for a little while and then she asked the question I was hoping to avoid.
“Is this because of your case? Because of Roulet?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “I told the cops about it but they seemed more interested in him being gay than anything else.”
“He was gay?”
I knew it would work as a deflection.
“He didn’t advertise it.”
“And you knew and didn’t tell me?”
“There was nothing to tell. It was his life. If he wanted to tell people, he would have told people, I guess.”
“The detectives said that’s what happened?”
“What?”
“You know, that his being gay is how he got murdered.”
“I don’t know. They kept asking about it. I don’t know what they think. They’ll look at everything and hopefully it will lead to something.”
There was silence. I looked up at the TV just as the winning run crossed the plate for the Dodgers and the stadium erupted in bedlam and joy. The bartender whooped and used a remote to turn up the broadcast. I looked away and put a hand over my free ear.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lorna said.
“About what?”
“About what we do. Mickey, when they catch the bastard who did this, he might call me to hire you.”
I got the bartender’s attention by shaking the ice in my empty glass. I wanted a refill. What I didn’t want was to tell Lorna that I believed I was already working for the bastard who had killed Raul.
“Lorna, take it easy. You’re getting —”
“It could happen!”
“Look, Raul was my colleague and he was also my friend. But I’m not going to change what I do or what I believe in because —”
“Maybe you should. Maybe we all should. That’s all I’m saying.”
She started crying again. The bartender brought my fresh drink and I took a third of it down in one gulp.
“Lorna, do you want me to come over there?”
“No, I don’t want anything. I don’t know what I want. This is just so awful.”
“Can I tell you something?”
“What? Of course you can.”
“You remember Jesus Menendez? My client?”
“Yes, but what’s he have —”
“He was innocent. And Raul was working on it. We were working on it. We’re going to get him out.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m telling you because we can’t take what happened to Raul and just stop in our tracks. What we do is important. It’s necessary.”
The words sounded hollow as I said them. She didn’t respond. I had probably confused her because I had confused myself.
“Okay?” I asked.
“Okay.”
“Good. I have to make some more calls, Lorna.”
“Will you tell me when you find out about the services?”
“I will.”
After closing my phone I decided to take a break before making another call. I thought about Lorna’s last question and realized I might be the one organizing the services she asked about. Unless an old woman in Detroit who had disowned Raul Levin twenty-five years ago stepped up to the plate.
I pushed my glass to the edge of the bar gutter and said to the bartender, “Gimme a Guinness and give yourself one, too.”
I decided it was time to slow down and one way was to drink Guinness, since it took so long to fill a glass out of the tap. When the bartender finally brought it to me I saw that he had etched a harp in the foam with the tap nozzle. An angel’s harp. I hoisted the glass before drinking from it.
“God bless the dead,” I said.
“God bless the dead,” the bartender said.
I drank heavily from the glass and the thick ale was like mortar I was sending down to hold the bricks together inside. All at once I felt like crying. But then my phone rang. I grabbed it up without looking at the screen and said hello. The alcohol had bent my voice into an unrecognizable shape.
“Is this Mick?” a voice asked.
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“It’s Louis. I just heard the news about Raul. I’m so sorry, man.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear as if it were a snake about to bite me. I pulled my arm back, ready to throw it at the mirror behind the bar, where I saw my own reflection. Then I stopped and brought it back.
“Yeah, motherfucker, how did you —”
I broke off and started laughing as I realized what I had just called him and what Raul Levin’s theory about Roulet had been.
“Excuse me,” Roulet said. “Are you drinking?”
“You’re damn right I’m drinking,” I said. “How the fuck do you already know what happened to Mish?”
“If by Mish you mean Mr. Levin, I just got a call from the Glendale police. A detective said she wanted to speak to me about him.”
That answer squeezed at least two of the vodkas right out of my liver. I straightened up on my stool.
“Sobel? Is that who called?”
&nb
sp; “Yeah, I think so. She said she got my name from you. She said it would be routine questions. She’s coming here.”
“Where?”
“The office.”
I thought about it for a moment but didn’t think Sobel was in any kind of danger, even if she came without Lankford. Roulet wouldn’t try anything with a cop, especially in his own office. My greater concern was that somehow Sobel and Lankford were already onto Roulet and I would be robbed of my chance to personally avenge Raul Levin and Jesus Menendez. Had Roulet left a fingerprint behind? Had a neighbor seen him go into Levin’s house?
“That’s all she said?”
“Yes. She said they were talking to all of his recent clients and I was the most recent.”
“Don’t talk to them.”
“You sure?”
“Not without your lawyer present.”
“Won’t they get suspicious if I don’t talk to them, like give them an alibi or something?”
“It doesn’t matter. They don’t talk to you unless I give my permission. And I’m not giving it.”
I gripped my free hand into a fist. I couldn’t stand the idea of giving legal advice to the man I was sure had killed my friend that very morning.
“Okay,” Roulet said. “I’ll send her on her way.”
“Where were you this morning?”
“Me? I was here at the office. Why?”
“Did anybody see you?”
“Well, Robin came in at ten. Not before that.”
I pictured the woman with the hair cut like a scythe. I didn’t know what to tell Roulet because I didn’t know what the time of death was. I didn’t want to mention anything about the tracking bracelet he supposedly had on his ankle.
“Call me after Detective Sobel leaves. And remember, no matter what she or her partner says to you, do not talk to them. They can lie to you as much as they want. And they all do. Consider anything they tell you to be a lie. They’re just trying to trick you into talking to them. If they tell you I said it was okay to talk, that is a lie. Pick up the phone and call me, I will tell them to get lost.”
“All right, Mick. That’s how I’ll play it. Thanks.”
He ended the call. I closed my phone and dropped it on the bar like it was something dirty and discarded.