Майкл Коннелли - The Law of Innocence

“You’re under arrest,” he said.

“For what?” I said. “You can’t just—”

“For your safety and mine I’m putting you into the back of the patrol car.”

He grabbed my elbow to turn me again, and walked me to the rear passenger door of his car. He put his hand on top of my head as he pushed me into the plastic seat in the back. He then leaned across to buckle me in.

“You know you can’t open the trunk,” I said. “You have no probable cause. You don’t know if that’s blood and you don’t know if it’s coming from the interior of the car. I could’ve driven through whatever it is.”

Milton pulled back out of the car and looked down at me.

“Exigent circumstances,” he said. “There might be someone in there who needs help.”

He slammed the door. I watched him go back to my Lincoln and study the trunk lid for some sort of release mechanism. Finding none, he went to the open driver’s door and reached in to remove the keys.

He used the key fob to pop the trunk, standing off to the side should someone come out of the trunk shooting. The lid went up and an interior light went on. Milton supplemented it with his own flashlight. He moved from left to right, stepping sideways and keeping his eyes and the beam on the contents of the trunk. From my angle in the back of the patrol car, I could not see into the trunk but could tell by the way Milton was maneuvering and bending down for a closer look that there was something there.

Milton tilted his head to talk into the radio mic on his shoulder and then made a call. Probably for backup. Probably for a homicide unit. I didn’t have to see into the trunk to know that Milton had found a body.

Sunday, December 1

Edgar Quesada sat next to me at a dayroom table as I read the last pages of the transcript from his trial. He had asked me to review his case files as a favor, hoping there was something I could see or do to help his situation. We were in the high-power module in the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. This was where they housed inmates on keep-away status as they waited for trial or, as in Quesada’s case, sentencing to state prison. It was the first Sunday evening in December and the jail was cold. Quesada wore white long johns under his blue jumpsuit, the sleeves all the way down to his wrists.

Quesada was in familiar surroundings. He had been down this path before and had the tattoos to prove it. He was a third-generation White Fence gang member from Boyle Heights with lots of inked allegiance to the gang and the Mexican Mafia, which was the largest and most powerful gang in California’s jail and prison systems.

According to the documents I had been reading, Quesada had been the driver of a car that carried two other members of White Fence as they fired automatic weapons through the plate-glass windows of a bodega on East First Street, where the owner had fallen two weeks behind on the gang tax that White Fence had been extorting from him for almost twenty-five years. The shooters had aimed high, the attack intended to be a warning. But a ricochet went low and hit the bodega owner’s granddaughter on the top of the head as she crouched behind the counter. Her name was Marisol Serrano. She died instantly, according to testimony I read from the deputy coroner.

No witnesses to the crime identified the shooters. That would have been a fatal exercise in bravery. But a traffic cam caught the license plate on the getaway car. It was traced to a car stolen from the long-term parking garage at nearby Union Station. And cameras there caught a glimpse of the thief: Edgar Quesada. His trial lasted only four days and he was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. His sentencing was in a week and he was looking at a minimum of fifteen years in prison with the likelihood of many more beyond that. All because he had been behind the wheel on a drive-by warning-turned-murder.

“So?” Quesada said as I flipped the last page over.

“Well, Edgar,” I said. “I think you’re kind of fucked.”

“Man, don’t tell me that. There’s nothing? Nothing at all?”

“There’s always things you can do. But they’re long shots, Edgar. I’d say you have more than enough here for an IAC motion but—”

“What’s that?”

“Ineffective assistance of counsel. Your lawyer sat on his hands the whole trial. He let objection after objection pass. He just let the prosecutor— Well, here, you see this page?”

I moved back through the transcript to a page where I had folded a corner over.

“Here the judge even says, ‘Are you going to object, Mr. Seguin, or do I have to keep doing it for you?’ That is not good trial work, Edgar, and you might have a shot at proving that, but here is the thing: at best you win the motion and get a do-over, but that doesn’t change the evidence. It’s still the same evidence and with the next jury you’ll go down again, even if you have a new lawyer who knows how to keep the prosecutor inside the lines.”

Quesada shook his head. He was not my client, so I didn’t know all the details of his life but he was about thirty-five and looking at a lot of hard time.

“How many convictions do you have?” I asked.

“Two,” he said.

“Felonies?”

He nodded and I didn’t have to say anything else. My original assessment stood. He was fucked. He was probably going away forever. Unless...

“You know why they got you here in high-power instead of the gang module, right?” I said. “Any day now they’re going to pull you out of here, put you in a room, and ask you the big question. Who was in the car with you that day?”

I gestured to the thick transcript.

“There’s nothing here that will help you,” I said. “The only thing you can do is deal the time down by giving up names.”

I said the last part in a whisper. But Quesada didn’t respond as quietly.

“That’s bullshit !” he yelled.

I checked the mirrored window of the control room overhead even though I knew I could see nothing behind it. I then looked at Quesada and saw the veins in his neck start to pulse — even beneath the inked necklace of cemetery stones that circled it.

“Cool down, Edgar,” I said. “You asked me to look at your file and that’s all I’m doing. I’m not your lawyer. You should really talk to him about—”

“I can’t go to him,” Quesada said. “Haller, you don’t know shit!” I stared at him and finally understood. His lawyer was controlled by the very people he would need to inform on: White Fence. Going to him would almost assuredly result in a Mexican Mafia — engineered snitch shanking, whether he was in the high-power module or not. It was said that the eMe, as it was more informally known, could get to anybody anywhere in a California lockdown.

I was literally saved by the bell. The five-minute warning horn before bed check sounded. Quesada reached across the table and roughly grabbed up his documents. He was through with me. He got up while still smoothing all the loose pages into a neat stack. Without a Thank you or a Fuck you, he headed off to his cell.

And I headed to mine.

At 8 p.m. The steel door of my cell automatically slid closed with a metallic bang that jolted my entire being. Every night it went through me like a train. I had been in lockup for five weeks now and it was something I couldn’t and didn’t ever want to get used to. I sat down on the three-inch-thin mattress and closed my eyes. I knew the overhead light would stay on another hour and I needed to use that time, but this was my ritual. To try to blank out all the harsh sounds and fears. To remind myself of who I still was. A father, a lawyer — but not a murderer.