Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict

It took her a moment to answer as she looked through the records.

“Uh, Samuels is one and Henson is the other. They’re both about five thousand behind.”

“And that’s why we take credit cards and don’t put out paper.”

I was talking about my own business routine. I had long ago stopped providing credit services. I took nonrefundable cash payments. I also took plastic, but not until Lorna had run the card and gotten purchase approval.

I looked down at the notes I had kept while conducting a quick review of the calendar and the active files. Both Samuels and Henson were on a sub list I had drawn up while reviewing the actives. It was a list of cases I was going to cut loose if I could. This was based on my quick review of the charges and facts of the cases. If there was something I didn’t like about a case – for any reason – then it went on the sub list.

“No problem,” I said. “We’ll cut ’em loose.”

Samuels was a manslaughter DUI case and Henson was a felony grand theft and drug possession. Henson momentarily held my interest because Vincent was going to build a defense around the client’s addiction to prescription painkillers. He was going to roll sympathy and deflection defenses into one. He would lay out a case in which the doctor who overprescribed the drugs to Henson was the one most responsible for the consequences of the addiction he created. Patrick Henson, Vincent would argue, was a victim, not a criminal.

I was intimately familiar with this defense because I had employed it repeatedly over the past two years to try to absolve myself of the many infractions I had committed in my roles as father, ex-husband and friend to people in my life. But I put Henson into what I called the dog pile because I knew at heart the defense didn’t hold up – at least not for me. And I wasn’t ready to go into court with it for him either.

Lorna nodded and made notes about the two cases on a pad of paper.

“So what is the score on that?” she asked. “How many cases are you putting in the dog pile?”

“We came up with thirty-one active cases,” I said. “Of those, I’m thinking only seven look like dogs. So that means we’ve got a lot of cases where there’s no money in the till. I’ll either have to get new money or they’ll go in the dog pile, too.”

I wasn’t worried about having to go and get money out of the clients. Skill number one in criminal defense is getting the money. I was good at it and Lorna was even better. It was getting paying clients in the first place that was the trick, and we’d just had two dozen of them dropped into our laps.

“You think the judge is just going to let you drop some of these?” she asked.

“Nope. But I’ll figure something out on that. Maybe I could claim conflict of interest. The conflict being that I like to be paid for my work and the clients don’t like to pay.”

No one laughed. No one even cracked a smile. I moved on.

“Anything else on the money?” I asked.

Lorna shook her head.

“That’s about it. When you’re in court, I’m going to call the bank and get that started. You want us both to be signers on the accounts?”

“Yeah, just like with my accounts.”

I hadn’t considered the potential difficulty of getting my hands on the money that was in the Vincent accounts. That was what I had Lorna for. She was good on the business end in ways I wasn’t. Some days she was so good I wished we had either never gotten married or never gotten divorced.

“See if Wren Williams can sign checks,” I said. “If she’s on there, take her off. For now I want just you and me on the accounts.”

“Will do. You may have to go back to Judge Holder for a court order for the bank.”

“That’ll be no problem.”

My watch said I had ten minutes before I had to get going to court. I turned my attention to Wojciechowski.

“Cisco, whaddaya got?”

I had told him earlier to work his contacts and to monitor the investigation of Vincent’s murder as closely as possible. I wanted to know what moves the detectives were making because it appeared from what Bosch had said that the investigation was going to be entwined with the cases I had just inherited.

“Not much,” Cisco said. “The detectives haven’t even gotten back to Parker Center yet. I called a guy I know in forensics and they’re still processing everything. Not a lot of info on what they do have but he told me about something they don’t. Vincent was shot at least two times that they could tell at the scene. And there were no shells. The shooter cleaned up.”

There was something telling in that. The killer had either used a revolver or had had the presence of mind after killing a man to pick up the bullet casings ejected from his gun.

Cisco continued his report.

“I called another contact in communications and she told me the first call came in at twelve forty-three. They’ll narrow down time of death at autopsy.”

“Is there a general idea of what happened?”

“It looks like Vincent worked late, which was apparently his routine on Mondays. He worked late every Monday, preparing for the week ahead. When he was finished he packed his briefcase, locked up and left. He goes to the garage, gets in his car and gets popped through the driver’s side window. When they found him the car was in park, the ignition on. The window was down. It was in the low sixties last night. He could’ve put the window down because he liked the chill, or he could’ve lowered it for somebody coming to the car.”

“Somebody he knew.”

“That’s one possibility.”

I thought about this and what Detective Bosch had said.

“Nobody was working in the garage?”

“No, the attendant leaves at six. You have to put your money in the machine after that or use your monthly pass. Vincent had a monthly.”

“Cameras?”

“Only cameras are where you drive in and out. They’re license plate cameras so if somebody says they lost their ticket they can tell when the car went in, that sort of thing. But from what I hear from my guy in forensics, there was nothing on tape that was useful. The killer didn’t drive into the garage. He walked in either through the building or through one of the pedestrian entrances.”

“Who found Jerry?”

“The security guard. They got one guard for the building and the garage. He hits the garage a couple times a night and noticed Vincent’s car on his second sweep. The lights were on and it was running, so he checked it out. He thought Vincent was sleeping at first, then he saw the blood.”

I nodded, thinking about the scenario and how it had gone down. The killer was either incredibly careless and lucky or he knew the garage had no cameras and he would be able to intercept Jerry Vincent there on a Monday night when the space was almost deserted.

“Okay, stay on it. What about Harry Potter?”

“Who?”

“The detective. Not Potter. I mean-”

“Bosch. Harry Bosch. I’m working on that, too. Supposedly he’s one of the best. Retired a few years ago and the police chief himself recruited him back. Or so the story goes.”

Cisco referred to some notes on a pad.

“Full name is Hieronymus Bosch. He has a total of thirty-three years on the job and you know what that means.”

“No, what does it mean?”

“Well, under the LAPD’s pension program you max out at thirty years, meaning that you are eligible for retirement with full pension and no matter how long you stay on the job, after thirty years your pension doesn’t grow. So it makes no economic sense to stay.”

“Unless you’re a man on a mission.”

Cisco nodded.

“Exactly. Anybody who stays past thirty isn’t staying for the money or the job. It’s more than a job.”