“Regina Campo. Friends call her Reggie. Twenty-six years old. She told police she’s an actress working as a telephone solicitor.”
“And hoping to retire soon,” Dobbs said.
I ignored him.
“Louis, did you know Reggie Campo before last night?” I asked.
Roulet shrugged.
“Sort of. I’d seen her around the bar scene. But I had never been with her before. I’d never even spoken to her.”
“Had you ever tried?”
“No, I never could really get to her. She always seemed to be with someone or more than one person. I don’t like to have to penetrate the crowd, you know? My style is to look for the singles.”
“What was different last night?”
“Last night she came to me, that was what was different.”
“Tell us about it.”
“Nothing to tell. I was at the bar at Morgan’s, minding my own business, having a look at the possibilities, and she was at the other end and she was with some guy. So she wasn’t even on my radar because she looked like she was already taken, you know?”
“Uh-huh, so what happened?”
“Well, after a while the guy she was with gets up to go take a leak or go outside for a smoke, and as soon as he’s gone she gets up and slides on down the bar to me and asks if I’m interested. I said I was but what about the guy she’s already with? She says don’t worry about him, he’ll be out the door by ten and then she’s free the rest of the night. She wrote her address down for me and said to come by after ten. I told her I’d be there.”
“What did she write the address down on?”
“A napkin, but the answer to your next question is no, I don’t still have it. I memorized the address and threw out the napkin. I work in real estate. I can remember addresses.”
“About what time was this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, she said come by at ten. Did you look at your watch at any point to see how long you would have to wait until then?”
“I think it was between eight and nine. As soon as the guy came back in they left.”
“When did you leave the bar?”
“I stayed for a few minutes and then I left. I made one more stop before I went to her place.”
“Where was that?”
“Well, she lived in an apartment in Tarzana so I went up to the Lamplighter. It was on the way.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know, I wanted to see what the possibilities were. You know, see if there was something better out there, something I didn’t have to wait around for or . . .”
“Or what?”
He still didn’t finish the thought.
“Take seconds on?”
He nodded.
“Okay, so who’d you talk to at the Lamplighter? Where is that, by the way?”
It was the only place so far I was unfamiliar with.
“It’s on Ventura near White Oak. I didn’t really talk to anybody. It was crowded but there really wasn’t anybody I was interested in there.”
“The bartenders know you there?”
“No, not really. I don’t go there all that much.”
“You usually get lucky before you hit the third option?”
“Nah, I usually just give up after two.”
I nodded just to buy a little time to think about what else to ask before we got to what happened at the victim’s house.
“How long were you at the Lamplighter?”
“About an hour, I’d say. Maybe a little less.”
“At the bar? How many drinks?”
“Yeah, two drinks at the bar.”
“How many drinks in all did you have last night before getting to Reggie Campo’s apartment?”
“Um, four at the most. Over two, two and a half, hours. I left one drink untouched at Morgan’s.”
“What were you drinking?”
“Martinis. Gray Goose.”
“Did you pay for any of these drinks in any of these places with a credit card?” Levin asked, offering his first question of the interview.
“No,” Roulet said. “When I go out, I pay cash.”
I looked at Levin and waited to see if he had anything else to ask. He knew more about the case than I did at this moment. I wanted to give him free rein to ask what he wanted. He looked at me and nodded. He was good to go.
“Okay,” I said. “What time was it when you got to Reggie’s place?”
“It was twelve minutes to ten. I looked at my watch. I wanted to make sure I didn’t knock on her door early.”
“So what did you do?”
“I waited in the parking lot. She said ten so I waited till ten.”
“Did you see the guy she left Morgan’s with come out?”
“Yeah, I saw him. He came out and left, then I went up.”
“What kind of car was he driving?” Levin asked.
“A yellow Corvette,” Roulet said. “It was a nineties version. I don’t know the exact year.”
Levin nodded. He was finished. I knew he was just trying to get a line on the man who had been in Campo’s apartment before Roulet. I took the questioning back.
“So he leaves and you go in. What happens?”
“I go in the building and her place is on the second floor. I go up and knock and she answers and I walk in.”
“Hold on a second. I don’t want the shorthand. You went up? How? Stairs, elevator, what? Give us the details.”
“Elevator.”
“Anybody else on it? Anybody see you?”
Roulet shook his head. I signaled him to continue.
“She opened the door a crack, saw it was me and told me to come in. There was a hallway by the front door so it was kind of a tight space. I walked by her so she could close the door. That’s how come she was behind me. And so I didn’t see it coming. She had something. She hit me with something and I went down. It got black real fast.”
I was silent while I thought about this, tried to picture it in my mind.
“So before a single thing happened, she just knocked you out? She didn’t say anything, yell anything, just sort of came up behind and bang.”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, then what? What do you remember next?”
“It’s still pretty foggy. I remember waking up and these two guys are sitting on me. Holding me down. And then the police came. And the paramedics. I was sitting up against the wall and my hands were cuffed and the paramedic put that ammonia or something under my nose and that’s when I really came out of it.”
“You were still in the apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“Where was Reggie Campo?”
“She was sitting on the couch and another paramedic was working on her face and she was crying and telling the other cop that I had attacked her. All these lies. That I had surprised her at the door and punched her, that I said I was going to rape her and then kill her, all these things I didn’t do. And I moved my arms so I could look down at my hands behind my back. I saw they had my hand in like a plastic bag and I could see blood on my hand, and that’s when I knew the whole thing was a setup.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She put blood on my hand to make it look like I did it. But it was my left hand. I’m not left-handed. If I was going to punch somebody, I’d use my right hand.”
He made a punching gesture with his right hand to illustrate this for me in case I didn’t get it. I got up from my spot and paced over to the window. It now seemed like I was higher than the sun. I was looking down at the sunset. I felt uneasy about Roulet’s story. It seemed so far-fetched that it might actually be true. And that bothered me. I was always worried that I might not recognize innocence. The possibility of it in my job was so rare that I operated with the fear that I wouldn’t be ready for it when it came. That I would miss it.
“Okay, let’s talk about this for a second,” I said, still facing the sun. “You’re saying that she
puts blood on your hand to set you up. And she puts it on your left. But if she was going to set you up, wouldn’t she put the blood on your right, since the vast majority of people out there are right-handed? Wouldn’t she go with the numbers?”
I turned back to the table and got blank stares from everyone.
“You said she opened the door a crack and then let you in,” I said. “Could you see her face?”
“Not all of it.”
“What could you see?”
“Her eye. Her left eye.”
“So did you ever see the right side of her face? Like when you walked in.”
“No, she was behind the door.”
“That’s it!” Levin said excitedly. “She already had the injuries when he got there. She hid it from him, then he steps in and she clocks him. All the injuries were to the right side of her face and that dictated that she put the blood on his left hand.”
I nodded as I thought about the logic of this. It seemed to make sense.
“Okay,” I said, turning back to the window and continuing to pace. “I think that’ll work. Now, Louis, you’ve told us you had seen this woman around the bar scene before but had never been with her. So, she was a stranger. Why would she do this, Louis? Why would she set you up like you say she did?”
“Money.”
But it wasn’t Roulet who answered. It had been Dobbs. I turned from the window and looked at him. He knew he had spoken out of turn but didn’t seem to care.
“It’s obvious,” Dobbs said. “She wants money from him, from the family. The civil suit is probably being filed as we speak. The criminal charges are just the prelude to the suit, the demand for money. That’s what she’s really after.”
I sat back down and looked at Levin, exchanging eye contact.
“I saw a picture of this woman in court today,” I said. “Half her face was pulped. You are saying that’s our defense, that she did that to herself?”
Levin opened his file and took out a piece of paper. It was a black-and-white photocopy of the evidence photograph Maggie McPherson had showed me in court. Reggie Campo’s swollen face. Levin’s source was good but not good enough to get him actual photos. He slid the photocopy across the table to Dobbs and Roulet.
“We’ll get the real photos in discovery,” I said. “They look worse, a lot worse, and if we go with your story, then the jury—that is, if this gets to a jury—is going to have to buy that she did that to herself.”
I watched Roulet study the photocopy. If it had been he who attacked Reggie Campo, he showed no tell while studying his handiwork. He showed nothing at all.
“You know what?” I said. “I like to think I’m a good lawyer and a good persuader when it comes to juries. But even I’m having trouble believing myself with that story.”
NINE
I t was now Raul Levin’s turn in the conference room. We’d spoken while I had been riding into Century City and eating bites of roast beef sandwich. I had plugged my cell into the car’s speaker phone and told my driver to put his earbuds in. I’d bought him an iPod his first week on the job. Levin had given me the basics of the case, just enough to get me through the initial questioning of my client. Now Levin would take command of the room and go through the case, using the police and evidence reports to tear Louis Roulet’s version of events to shreds, to show us what the prosecution would have on its side. At least initially I wanted Levin to be the one to do this because if there was going to be a good guy/bad guy aspect to the defense, I wanted to be the one Roulet would like and trust. I wanted to be the good guy.
Levin had his own notes in addition to the copies of the police reports he had gotten through his source. It was all material the defense was certainly entitled to and would receive through the discovery process, but usually it took weeks to get it through court channels instead of the hours it had taken Levin. As he spoke he held his eyes down on these documents.
“At ten-eleven last night the LAPD communications center received a nine-one-one emergency call from Regina Campo of seventeen-sixty White Oak Boulevard, apartment two-eleven. She reported an intruder had entered her home and attacked her. Patrol officers responded and arrived on the premises at ten-seventeen. Slow night, I guess, because that was pretty quick. Better than average response to a hot shot. Anyway, the patrol officers were met in the parking lot by Ms. Campo, who said she had fled the apartment after the attack. She informed the officers that two neighbors named Edward Turner and Ronald Atkins were in her apartment, holding the intruder. Officer Santos proceeded to the apartment, where he found the suspect intruder, later identified as Mr. Roulet, lying on the floor and in the command and control of Turner and Atkins.”
“They were the two faggots who were sitting on me,” Roulet said.
I looked at Roulet and saw the flash of anger quickly fade.
“The officers took custody of the suspect,” Levin continued, as if he had not been interrupted. “Mr. Atkins —”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where was he found on the floor? What room?”
“Doesn’t say.”
I looked at Roulet.
“It was the living room. It wasn’t far from the front door. I never got that far in.”
Levin wrote a note to himself before continuing.
“Mr. Atkins produced a folding knife with the blade open, which he said had been found on the floor next to the intruder. The officers handcuffed the suspect, and paramedics were called to treat both Campo and Roulet, who had a head laceration and slight concussion. Campo was transported to Holy Cross Medical Center for continued treatment and to be photographed by an evidence technician. Roulet was taken into custody and booked into Van Nuys jail. The premises of Ms. Campo’s apartment were sealed for crime scene processing and the case was assigned to Detective Martin Booker of Valley Bureau detectives.”
Levin spread more photocopies of the police photos of Regina Campo’s injuries out on the table. There were front and profile shots of her face and two close-ups of bruising around her neck and a small puncture mark under her jaw. The copy quality was poor and I knew the photocopies weren’t worthy of serious study. But I did notice that all the facial injuries were on the right side of Campo’s face. Roulet had been correct about that. She had either been repeatedly punched by someone’s left hand—or possibly her own right hand.
“These were taken at the hospital, where Ms. Campo also gave a statement to Detective Booker. In summary, she said she came home about eight-thirty Sunday night and was home alone when there was a knock at her door at about ten o’clock. Mr. Roulet represented himself as someone Ms. Campo knew and so she opened the door. Upon opening the door she was immediately struck by the intruder’s fist and driven backwards into the apartment. The intruder entered and closed and locked the door. Ms. Campo attempted to defend herself but was struck at least twice more and driven to the floor.”
“This is such bullshit!” Roulet yelled.
He slammed his fists down on the table and stood up, his seat rolling backwards and banging loudly into the glass window behind him.
“Hey, easy now!” Dobbs cautioned. “You break the window and it’s like a plane. We all get sucked out of here and go down.”
No one smiled at his attempt at levity.
“Louis, sit back down,” I said calmly. “These are police reports, nothing more or less. They are not supposed to be the truth. They are one person’s view of the truth. All we are doing here is getting a first look at the case, seeing what we are up against.”
Roulet rolled his chair back to the table and sat down without further protest. I nodded to Levin and he continued. I noted that Roulet had long stopped acting like the meek prey I had seen earlier in the day in lockup.
“Ms. Campo reported that the man who attacked her had his fist wrapped in a white cloth when he punched her.”
I looked across the table at Roulet’s hands and saw no swelling or bruising on the knuckles or fingers. Wrapping his fist could have allowed
him to avoid such telltale injuries.
“Was it taken into evidence?” I asked.
“Yes,” Levin said. “In the evidence report it is described as a cloth dinner napkin with blood on it. The blood and the cloth are being analyzed.”
I nodded and looked at Roulet.
“Did the police look at or photograph your hands?”
Roulet nodded.
“The detective looked at my hands but nobody took pictures.”
I nodded and told Levin to continue.
“The intruder straddled Ms. Campo on the floor and grasped one hand around her neck,” he said. “The intruder told Ms. Campo that he was going to rape her and that it didn’t matter to him whether she was alive or dead when he did it. She could not respond because the suspect was choking her with his hand. When he released pressure she said she told him that she would cooperate.”
Levin slid another photocopy onto the table. It was a photo of a black-handled folding knife that was sharpened to a deadly point. It explained the earlier photo of the wound under the victim’s neck.
Roulet slid the photocopy over to look at it more closely. He slowly shook his head.
“This is not my knife,” he said.
I didn’t respond and Levin continued.
“The suspect and the victim stood up and he told her to lead the way to the bedroom. The suspect maintained a position behind the victim and pressed the point of the knife against the left side of her throat. As Ms. Campo entered a short hallway that led to the apartment’s two bedrooms she turned in the confined space and pushed her attacker backwards into a large floor vase. As he stumbled backwards over the vase, she made a break for the front door. Realizing that her attacker would recover and catch her at the front door, she ducked into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka off the counter. When the intruder passed by the kitchen on his way to the front door to catch her, Ms. Campo stepped out of the blind and struck him on the back of the head, knocking him to the floor. Ms. Campo then stepped over the fallen man and unlocked the front door. She ran out the door and called the police from the first-floor apartment shared by Turner and Atkins. Turner and Atkins returned to the apartment, where they found the intruder unconscious on the floor. They maintained control of him as he started to regain consciousness and remained in the apartment until police arrived.”